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AMERICAN RED CROSS WORK 
AMONG THE FRENCH PEOPLE 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NBW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANaSCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNK 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 




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AMERICAN RED CROSS WORK 
AMONG THE FRENCH PEOPLE 



BY 

FISHER AMES, Jr. 



I13eto gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1921 

A.U rights reserved 



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Copyright, 1921, 
Bt the MACMILLAN COMIPANT 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, January, 1921 



JAN 26 1821 



g)CU605516 



PEEFACE 

As it would be impossible to give in narrative form a 
full account of the activities of the American Red Cross 
among the French during the World War and keep it 
v^ithin the limits of a single volume, and as much of the 
work was purely technical, it has been thought best to 
deal with its various aspects in a general fashion rather 
than specialize on any. It is hoped thereby to inform the 
reader in an interesting way of the broad character and 
scope of American Red Cross efforts. 

It will be noticed that the book deals with work dur- 
ing the war period and the months immediately follow- 
ing and does not attempt to take up post-war activities in 
detail. 

EiSHEE Ames, Je. 

August, 1921. 



INTEODUCTION 

From the inception of the war partisanship for France 
was palpable in the United States. One heard and read 
recurring allusions to the vital aid she had rendered us 
during our War of the Revolution and the debt owed her 
by the world because of her consistent and heroic efforts 
to secure the rights of the individual. 

France had been the crucible where all the great social 
and political questions of Europe had first been tried out. 
She was ever one of the leaders in the onward march of 
civilization. In art, science, and literature she had held 
aloft the standard and throughout her history her courage 
and gallantry had burned like those inextinguishable lamps 
on the altars of the ancients. The wonder of the Crusades, 
that still glows for us like a lonely jewel in the dark setting 
of the Middle Ages, is due mainly to her and she it was 
who first emerged from the gloom of those stagnant years 
and gave to Europe the initial example of a new and 
definite social organization. It was on her soil that the 
people, as distinguished from the aristocracy, first united 
in the Third Estate whose voice, sounding always the 
slogan of justice for the masses, was heard and heeded in 
other countries. From her Revolution came those ideas 
that are today the basis of her public and private laws; 
ideas which " the Republic and the Empire, by their vic- 
tories, disseminated in every part of Europe and which are 
destined to spread over the whole world because they are 
summed up in the one word justice." 

The fact that Germany already had the wanton victory of 
1870 to her discredit intensified the sympathy felt among 

the masses of America for France, and to the student of hi&- 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

tory it was known that instead of a grudge, she owed to 
France a special debt. It was the social principles brought 
into life by the French Revolution that finally raised the 
body of the German people out of their wretched and ill- 
formed state. Even Treitschke was compelled to admit 
that, " the Constitutional ideas of the Revolution struck 
root in German soil, and without the Revolution the fam- 
ous Article 13 of the Act creating the German Federation 
would never have seen the light.'' 

Thus for one reason or another there was a measurable 
amount of sentiment for France in the United States. 
War had hardly begun before twenty cases of bandages, 
addressed to the " French Army, Havre," reached that 
port. They were the first of a steadily increasing stream 
of gifts directed across the Atlantic by individuals, socie- 
ties, communities and eventually by the united people. 
Notwithstanding their reputation for practicality no peo- 
ple, if any, have greater capabilities for compassion 
and open-handedness than those of the United States, 
but they wish to be sure of their facts before they give 
freely. Their generosity to France at this time was the 
more noteworthy in that the United States as a whole had 
not taken sides, but stood apart in what was apparently 
a fixed attitude of neutrality. 

A number of societies for relief work with outlets in 
France were formed in the States and many volunteers 
crossed the Atlantic to fight or work by her side. Gifts 
continued to flow into her ports, but a large proportion 
were neither properly addressed nor classified. As a re- 
sult many went astray and thousands of crates and bales 
collected in neglected heaps at the French docks where 
no officials had been specially appointed to receive, ex- 
amine, and distribute them. France, laboring in the grip 
of war, had little time to think of them. Handicapped by 
a shortage of labor, material, and inadequate means of 
transportation, she was making the effort of her life to 
meet the inexorable demands of her fighting forces. 



INTRODUCTION 



IX 



It was impossible, even if it had fallen within its prov- 
ince, for our busy Embassy to undertake the task of regu- 
lating and distributing the gifts from America, but some- 
thing had to be done and under the initiative of Ambassa- 
dor Myron T. Herrick, an organization called the Ameri- 
can Relief Clearing House was formed at Paris, " to bring 
order out of a tangle of good intent.'' This was the first 
seed of organized American relief work on French soil and 
the French immediately perceived in it that energy of 
growth so typical of American affairs. JSTor was it long 
before they realized that the generous motives animating 
it were equally characteristic of our national spirit. 

The task confronting the Clearing House, though rela- 
tively much simpler, had many aspects in common with 
the greater work later undertaken by the people of the 
United States through their official agent, the Red Cross. 
Its list of patrons was imposing, but actually it was always 
short of working personnel — the majority of whom were 
volunteers serving without pay — and its own transporta- 
tion facilities were exceedingly meager for an organization 
which was in the main an agency for forwarding relief sup- 
plies from America to their various destinations in France. 
By keeping closely in touch with the French authorities it 
was able to inform its 'New York branch, and other war 
relief societies at home, as to the quantity and kind of sup- 
plies most needed. It also visited the wounded in the hos- 
pitals and aided destitute refugees. These are but samples 
of its activities. In spite of never-ending difficulties it 
steadily enlarged its field of usefulness until it had built 
up a schedule of operation that touched almost every phase 
of war relief. Its well-earned repu»tation for benevolence 
and efficiency rests upon the fine pluck and perseverance 
of a handful of men. 

The work of the Clearing House deserves a more ex- 
tended mention than can be given here. When the Red 
Cross came it turned over to that organization its franchise 
for crossing the ocean, granted it by the French Govern- 



X INTRODUCTION 

ment; all its supplies and personnel, and its assets; and 
there was not one debt. The leader of the Red Cross 
Commission said of this action : '^ The Red Cross could 
never have accomplished what it did — in the time it did 
— without this aid." If France had reason for being 
grateful to the American members of the Clearing House, 
and she has often expressed her gratitude, it is equally 
certain that our country has a right to feel proud of 
them. 

Germany^s failure to see others as they really were was, 
perhaps, particularly gross, but she was n'ot the only coun- 
try that studied the rest of the world through its own 
spectacles. Prior to the war few of us perfectly under- 
stood the workings of the Teuton mind, and it might be 
added that the United States has been the object of an al- 
most universal misconception, some foreigners regarding us 
as a shrewd, eccentric, and crude people, finance mad, 
hard as nails and quite lacking in any cohesion or national 
consciousness, while others looked upon us less seriously as 
the land of the ready revolver, the bucking bronco, and the 
sinister millionaire with the romantic daughter. Europe 
commonly believed that we steered a carefully neutral 
course through those first years of war because such a 
course meant money in our pockets. On the other hand 
we were guilty of equally grave mistakes in our estimates 
of the peoples of the Old World. 

The attitude of the United States at the beginning of 
hostilities was not the result of deliberate choice. It was 
the most sacred of our few political legacies. There is 
nothing to be gained by a detailed discussion of the subject 
here, but our geographical isolation from the Old World 
and our mental aloofness from its politics had made of us a 
self -centered people. The governments of Europe had been 
content to leave us out of their round-table conferences. 
To the great majority of the citizens of the United States 
the world politics of Europe represented something unde- 
sirable and oppressive from whose influence they or their 



INTRODUCTION xi 

ancestors had had the energy happily to escape. The roots 
of most European " questions '' or alliances seemed to be 
sunk in the selfish, reactionary, or sinister aims of the 
various governments, aims which had little to do with the 
will of the governed whose welfare appeared to be consid- 
ered only incidentally, if at all. 

Such, at least, was the opinion of the average citizen of 
the United States who saw in the breaking out of the war 
merely another and bolder move than usual in that intricate 
political game round which the diplomats of the Old World 
had always warily sat. Our first instinctive feeling was 
one of repulsion and indignation at the brutal climax. We 
were too far away, too alien to the situation, to see the real 
factors hidden under the net-work of intrigue. It was 
only when the German government had completely torn off 
her mask that we could trust ourselves to sit in the seat 
of judgment. 

Complex though the physical mass of our population is, 
it is united in its love of liberty and its self-confidence. A 
race of men who have boldly broken away from their 
original environments to hue ouj; a new life in a remote 
land, either from ambition, from devotion to abstract prin- 
ciples, or a desire for adventure cannot be otherwise than 
self-confident. Tear of what Germany might do to us 
after she had conquered Europe had little weight in our 
decision. It is not easy to inject the virus of fear into 
such a nation as the United States. On the other hand 
it is a nation readily receptive to sentiment. 

None of the other world powers were conscious of the 
apparently paradoxical fact that sentiment and idealism 
can flourish in a land where practicality and business 
efficiency are supposed to be the great gods of mundane 
affairs. But when President Wilson on April 6, 1917, de- 
clared a state of war against Germany, the United States, 
as one man, received the call to arms in a spirit of exalta- 
tion somewhat analgous to that which animated the con- 
tenders in the religious wars of the past. There was no 



xii INTRODUCTION 

thought of material gain, no national pride to flaunt, or in- 
jury to avenge. The country declared itself ready to give 
even to its last man and its last dollar, because it believed 
that the might of Germany threatened the existence of 
those abstract principles in which America has put its 
abiding faith. 

When General Joffre visited the United States in the 
spring of 1917, he said : " Give us credit for food and shells 
and our army can hold out forever; give us something to 
show the French people that America is really with us, 
something they can see and understand, and they will back 
up our army to Berlin and beyond." It was an acknow- 
ledgment that the morale of the civil population was as im- 
portant a factor in the war as the valor of the men at the 
front. The struggle was too tremendous for its issue to 
depend merely upon a matter of rations and ammunition 
and fighting men. 

President Wilson, setting in motion all the immense 
economical, financial, and moral machinery of the country, 
began the raising of that army whose vigorous growth, en- 
thusiasm, and marvelously rapid, effective trans-shipment 
will always be considered one of the most vital and 
extraordinary factors of the great war. The mass of 
German citizens undoubtedly knew little or nothing of 
these preparations, but their Government, through its 
drag-net system of espionage, must have realized it 
was beholding the metamorphosis of that possibility so 
disdainfully dismissed by Admiral Yon Tirpitz as a mere 
" phantom," into an actuality of the most formidable 
proportions. With characteristic cunning they caused 
their agents to spread abroad an insidious fog of peace 
propaganda while at the same time they hastened their 
plans for the crushing of the Entente before the weight of 
American interference could overwhelmingly manifest it^ 
self upon the actual field of war. 

There was good cause to fear that they might succeed 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

in doing this. Russia, disorganized, tottering to its 
chaotic fall, was out of the conflict ; the wreck of Belgium 
was under the heel of the enemy and crippled France had 
lost her richest industrial regions while hundreds of thous- 
ands of her fighting men — the flower of her army — lay 
in their bloody graves, and hundreds of thousands of 
her women, children, and old men were destitute 
and homeless, exposed to the ravages of those diseases apt 
to follow in the wake of war. Great Britain, fearfully de- 
pleted in man power, money, and shipping, had already 
strained her sinews almost to the cracking point. Serbia 
and Eoumania had been struck to the ground and de- 
spoiled, their peoples little better than the serfs of their 
conquerors. 

It was for these grim reasons that General JofPre had 
said to the United States : " Give us something to show the 
French people that America is really with us, something 
they can see and understand.^' Something other than an 
official pledge — assurance enough between governments 
— was necessary in this crisis. The artisan in the factory, 
the wife and mother trembling in her home, the old peasant 
toiling in his threatened fields, the soldier interposing his 
body as a bulwark against the thrusts of the enemy, these 
were in need of more tangible aid than any promise how- 
ever solemn. Their need was pressing. They could not 
wait for the full materialization of our military plans. 

Though we had not perceived it at the time the prin- 
ciples for which we were eager to fight in 1917 had been 
at stake in 1914. The knowledge of this wrought in the 
United States an almost passionate appreciation of what 
our new Allies had done and endured, and a determination 
to make every effort possible and every sacrifice necessary 
to compensate for our late entry into the war. The 
feverish desire to co-operate immediately and to the full 
extent of our power led to some mistakes, but they were 
trifles compared to the great results achieved. Govern- 
ment and people united in practical examples of generosity. 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

Our citizens voluntarily denied themselves wheat, meat, 
and other forms of food that our Allies might be better fed. 
In the face of impending heavy war taxes and the swiftly 
rising cost of living the people still had money to give out^ 
right for the relief of the war sufferers abroad. In the 
brief space of seven days they contributed the sum of one 
hundred million dollars to the Red Cross that it might be- 
gin at once its work of mercy in France. Before its activi- 
ties in that country were closed the organization received 
from the citizens of the United States subscriptions and 
voluntary contributions amounting in all to more than 
four hundred million dollars. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I In Paris 1 

n Beginnings and Outlines 10 

ni With French Hospitals 19 

rV Cantines au Front 29 

V Cantines des Deux Drapeaux 36 

VI The Mutiles 45 

VII Kefugees 63 

Vin The New Offensive 19 

IX Work Among the Children 102 

X Meurthe-et-Moselle 108 

XI Paris Dispensaries 119 

XII Work in Other Cities 124 

XIII Propaganda 139 

XrV War Orphans 147 

XV The White Plague 154 

XVI Going Back 165 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Comfort Bags for Everybody Frontispiece 

TAOINO 
PAGK 

First Aid 4 

Human Kepair 52 

Food for Hungry Mouths . 74 

" Dispensaire " 112 

For the Children 126 

Helping Them to Get Well 130 

Going Back 170 



AMERICAN RED CROSS WORK 
AMONG THE FRENCH PEOPLE 

CHAPTEK I 

IN PAEIS 

NO one had wanted war, but a great many had foreseen 
that it was bound to come sooner or later, and the na- 
tion as a whole had accepted it in a spirit of resignation 
and quiet determination, believing that it was ready for the 
issue. The mobilization of the troops had been a marvel- 
ously smooth and rapid performance. The people had con- 
fidence in their army and in themselves. They were not 
informed as to their own state of unpreparedness or the 
completeness and power of Germany's organization, and at 
the first drive of the enemy into France the life of Paris 
was for the moment seized with a kind of paralysis. 

Following this period of bewilderment there ensued 
a time of wild though superficial confusion. A great 
number of people began to hasten from the city towards 
havens of safety. Many of the selfish rich left ; the timid 
and the downright cowardly swelled the rush. The 
majority of the foreigners who idle about Paris were 
among the first to go. Certain trades and professions, see- 
ing their custom and customers vanish, began to close their 
doors, and of their employees some were obliged to find 
work elsewhere or starve. 

!N'ot all of these hegiras took place at the first alarm. 
Each succeeding one was marked by an outgoing wave; 



2 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

but Paris was stripped to its real self comparatively early 
in the war. All its surface glitter and gayety disappeared 
as one casts off a tinselled domino. By day the city was 
calm and quietly busy though its more fashionable streets 
were almost empty, and at night it had the soundless black- 
ness of a tomb. Those of its citizens who did not wear 
mourning dressed in the most sober of colors. But flower 
stalls and barrows had never been more plentiful or glow- 
ing : there were so many graves to decorate. 

The Paris that was left was splendid in its sacrifices and 
its charities. The number of its relief works mounted 
into the thousands and apparently overlooked no need ; they 
were supplemented by others organized by foreigners which 
had their place and value and deserve special mention not 
only for the good they accomplished, but because their capi- 
tal and personnel were generous testimonials to their affec- 
tion for the French. 

" It is curious," said a French writer, " that with their 
uniformity of purpose, of rule and, in general, of installa- 
tion, they preserve their national characteristics to the 
point that, in those hospitals destined for the French, estab- 
lished upon the soil of France and in French buildings, one 
breathes an entirely foreign atmosphere. The visits to 
them are doubly interesting. One realizes his debt of 
gratitude to our wounded, and at the same time accom- 
plishes something like an excursion into distant regions." 

He had in mind the hospitals organized by the Ameri- 
can colony of Paris, the Scotch Suffragists, and the Eed 
Cross of Tokio. The first, which was at E'euilly, was 
afterwards taken over by our army and the American Bed 
Cross as Hospital JSTo. 1. 'No other hospital in the city 
was, in the opinion of the French visitors, so lavishly pro- 
vided for, and they professed to see in its scientific perfec- 
tion and its refinements of modern comfort something rep- 
resentative of the United States. I^othing was lacking 
that money could buy and that which could not be bought 
— the sympathetic devotion to duty of its personnel and 



IN PARIS 3 

the skill of its eminent surgeons and specialists — was 
given gratuitously. 

The hospital of the Scotch Suffragists was in the old 
gray abbey of Eoyaumont, a few miles outside of Paris. 
Here only the severely wounded were received, but except 
for a short period at the outset, when a French doctor as- 
sisted at some operations, no men were employed in the in- 
stitution. True to their opinions, the suffragists main- 
tained an entirely feminine personnel. From surgeons to 
stretcher-bearers all were women, and when the French 
physician gallantly retired it was with the full conviction 
that the aft'airs of the hospital were in capable hands. 
These charitable suffragists, in proving that, given the 
same training, a woman can do what a man can, furnished 
an example decidedly useful to the advancement of their 
cause. 

Only wounded without family or friends were sent to 
the hospital of the Red Cross of Tokio on the Champs- 
filysees. The young Japanese nurses came of good fami- 
lies and were highly trained and scrupulously attentive to 
the wants of their patients, and the gentleness and skill 
of its physicians was what one might have expected in 
view of the splendid reputation of Japan's medical pro- 
fession. The hospital was a peculiarly quiet and restful 
place. With its soft-footed, smiling personnel, its calm- 
ness and its effect of immaculate simplicity, which an 
occasional single flower in a glass vase or a spray of cherry 
blossoms served only to emphasize, it was full of the sooth- 
ing atmosphere of the Orient. 

There were English, Canadian, and Australian forma- 
tions and foreign charitable committees, almost without 
number. iNTearly all of the neutral nations made contribu- 
tions in one way or another to some form of relief work and 
scores of private individuals, particularly Americans who 
knew and loved Paris well, gave with unabated generosity. 
The Rockefeller Foundation should have a prominent place 
in the list of benevolent foreign organizations, the greatest 



4 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

of which, before the arrival of the American Red Cross, 
was undoubtedly the American Eelief Clearing House and 
its allies, whose wide-spread activities have already been 
mentioned. Russian and Italian hospitals also opened 
their doors to the French wounded. 

Throughout the world women, rich and poor, joined to- 
gether in voluntary aid societies with distributing bureaus 
in Paris to which they sent bandages and garments for 
the soldiers and the destitute. What finer, more touching 
thought than this: the desire of these women of distant 
nations to help alleviate by the work of their own hands 
the suffering caused by the war. 

The measure of charity given by Paris itself was sl full 
one. First and foremost were the activities of the Croix- 
Bouge Frangaise with its three united societies. Of the 
four hundred and eighteen hospitals in the city and its 
vicinity the Croix-Bouge maintained two hundred and 
eighty-six. It operated besides a long chain of annexes 
such as railway canteens, pastes de secours^ auto-ambulance 
units, schools for mutiles, places of shelter for refugees and 
prisoners, and cercles a foyers du soldat By its able 
management of these many-fold forms of service it proved 
itself an organization with few equals. 

"No list of the relief societies of the capital would be 
complete without the name of the Croix-Verte which from 
the most humble of beginnings grew to be a great power 
for the dissemination of war charity. Unlike the Croix- 
Bouge it was non-existent before 1914, and was born by 
chance in the Montparnasse railway station where soon 
after the commencement of hostilities a French couple 
and their friend observed a detachment of troops waiting 
for the train that was to carry them to the front. There 
was no buffet where the hungry men could refresh them- 
selves and no comfortable place in which they could rest. 
The idea of providing for these simple needs occurred to 
the three spectators and was immediately acted upon. 
Permission was secured to install a little kitchen at which 










o 



W CO 






O M 

2| 



IN PARIS 5 

the two women prepared and served tea and coffee to the 
soldiers, and thus the work of VAcceuil, the first of the ac- 
tivities of the Croix-Yerte, was created. 

Starting with a personnel of three this infant society de- 
veloped a membership of many thousands. Gradually it 
increased the number of its kitchens which were soon pre- 
paring a full meal for the troops. In the meantime it 
launched its second enterprise, UAcceuil aux Re fugles, 
which fed the convoys of fugitives pouring into the city. 
Its most important service was the founding of a vestiaire 
where clothes were provided for refugees and wounded who 
were returning to civil life. It was one of the first of the 
relief associations to concern itself with the future of the 
ref ormes and its policy of giving work instead of alms to 
the mutilated soldier received the approbation of all 
France. It inaugurated also a system of visits to the hos- 
pitals by which divers forms of aid were given patients, 
particularly of the poorer classes. The American Eelief 
Clearing House contributed generously to this department 
by gifts of underwear which were in much demand and 
difficult to obtain. 

While the city was busy with its manifold works for the 
relief of wounded soldiers and the unfortunates of the in- 
vaded areas it had its own sharp taste of war. The Ger- 
mans believed that if they could break the spirit of Paris 
the courage of the nation would rapidly ebb and with this 
end in view they perpetrated an intermittent series of at- 
tacks upon the capital by Taubes, Zeppelins, Gothas and 
those extraordinary long-range guns which the French 
nicknamed Great Berthas. 

The first air-raid took place on August 30, 1914, about 
seven o'clock in the morning. Five bombs were dropped 
from the sky upon the astonished city, but small damage 
was accomplished save for a gas explosion on the rue de 
Vinaigriers. Seven air-raids followed, a total of forty-one 
bombs being dropped. The last occurred on October 12. 
On the 11th and 12th of May, 1915, the Germans made two 



6 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

more TauLe attacks that marked the end of the first series. 
The " ^ve o'clock Tauhes/' as they were called by the 
Parisians because of the time at which they commonly ap- 
peared, ceased to appear after this date. 

The bombs dropped by these machines were of four 
types, explosive, shrapnel, or incendiary, and in most cases 
did not weigh over four kilogrammes. That the object of 
the enemy was rather to intimidate than destroy was ap- 
parent from the fact that many of the pilots dropped only 
harmless darts carrying messages that foretold the early 
entry into Paris of the German army. Eleven persons 
were killed and fifty wounded. 

On March 21, 1915, and January 29 and 30, 1916, Ger- 
man Zeppelins, which had already made many raids in 
England, visited Paris with more formidable projectiles, 
but fortunately their aim was poor and the twenty-four 
explosive and incendiary bombs launched from these 
machines killed only twenty-six persons and wounded 
twenty-eight. Only one fire was started, on the rue des 
Dames, and this was extinguished with two buckets of 
water. 

The last Zeppelin raid marked the beginning of a cessa- 
tion of the air attacks that lasted for almost two years. 
At any moment during that period the Parisians expected 
to be awakened by the droning of the Gothas, against whose 
coming the military authorities had made preparations. 
At last, on January 30, 1918, the " birds of prey " made 
their appearance and in spite of the fact that the city had 
been warned it was full of lights and furnished an ex- 
cellent target for the aerial raiders. " The night was 
magnificently clear ; the fire of the barrage was feeble, the 
defense having placed too much reliance upon the aero- 
planes of Bourget whose impotence began to be demon- 
strated on this evening.'' It was a terrible assault. 
Ninety-one large projectiles were dropped in the city itself 
and one hundred and seventy-eight in the outskirts. A 



IN PARIS 7 

large number of people were killed and wounded and great 
damage done to property. 

Other Gotha attacks followed, the last being on the night 
of September 14, 1918. The missiles used were almost 
exclusively of the bomb-torpedo type, like a huge cigar, 
some of them weighing as much as three hundred kilos. 
Wherever they landed they tore the stoutest stone buildings 
to fragments and wrecked the neighborhood completely. 

Before the Gotha raids ceased the shells from the Great 
Berthas had begun to fall in the city. The first landed 
upon the Quai de Seine on March 23, 1918, a little after 
seven o'clock in the morning. Eighteen shells, following 
each other at fifteen minute intervals, struck within the 
confines of Paris on that day. A gradually decreasing fire 
was kept up during the next few days and on March 
29 only one shell came, but by a fatal combination of 
circumstances that day was Good Eriday, and the solitary 
projectile struck the church of St. Gervais which was 
crowded with worshipers. More than one hundred of the 
congregation were killed or wounded, the majority of the 
victims being children and women. From that date the fir- 
ing grew more intermittent until it ceased on April 27, 
when the Great Berthas installed near Laon were put out 
of service. 

A month later a fresh flight of shells began to fall. The 
shelling lasted for about fifteen days after which there 
was a lull for more than a month. The firing was resumed 
on July 15, and on August 9, at a quarter to two in the 
afternoon the last missile reached Paris. A few minutes 
later two struck outside of the fortifications. The 
chapter of the Great Berthas was then closed. 

The projectiles from the long-distance cannon caused 
relatively little material damage compared with the 
number of their victims which reached a total of eight 
hundred and seventy-six killed or wounded. Though the 
figures were only slightly in excess of the list of casual- 



8 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

ties from the bombs of the German aircraft, long-distance 
bombardment was the more trying to the nerves of the 
citizens. The attacks of the avions and Zeppelins were 
briefer and their approach was heralded by blasts from the 
sirens and the reports of the anti-aircraft guns, while the 
shells from the Great Berthas fell without warning and 
during the hours when the life of the city was in full 
swing. Indirectly, however, the air-raids were responsible 
for a much greater loss of life for the habit, common 
in every quarter of the city, of passing the night in damp 
cellars and abris raised the mortality from bronchitis and 
pneumonia almost one hundred per cent. 

As the war went on charitable Paris found the demands 
upon it increase while at the same time its funds were 
diminishing. At first it had been the soldiers and the 
refugees that had needed aid. There was no diminution 
of its activities in these directions but rather a greater ef- 
fort to meet the still more urgent call, and then a new class, 
the widows and orphans, began to appear in such numbers 
as seriously to draw the attention of the city to them. 
The necessary work of relief was seen to be too much for 
any one society to handle and through the energy of various 
associations the cooperation of the public was secured, and 
a Comite d'Entente formed to coordinate all efforts. Ten 
charitable societies allied themselves for the common pur- 
pose of helping this new class of war sufferers and from 
its members was formed a central office to assure the func- 
tioning of the Comite. Other associations acting inde- 
pendently contributed to the support of these poor women 
and children. In the United States one hundred and fifty 
thousand children pledged themselves to send thirty-six 
dollars a year for two years to every one of one hundred 
and fifty thousand orphans whose fathers had died on the 
field of battle, and later on the strong American Society 
for the Relief of French War Orphans was formed under 
distinguished patronage. 

The losses, human and material, were cumulative. Pov- 



IN PARIS 9 

erty and sickness spread with increasing rapidity among 
the civilian population. Tuberculosis, already too preva- 
lent in France, gained headway and infant mortality as- 
sumed alarming proportions. 'New phases were constantly 
arising which Paris with inexhaustible sympathy en- 
deavored to meet. Every additional month of war brought 
its problems that pressed for immediate solution while 
the nation saw itself faced in the future by the gigantic 
task of restoring wrecked industries and rebuilding its 
hundreds of demolished towns. Her courage might well 
have broken under the weight of her burdens, but to her 
lasting glory the spirit of France remained high and un- 
faltering to the end. 



CHAPTER II 

BEGINIS^INGS AND OUTLINES 

TWO months after the United States made its decla- 
ration of war against Germany the Red Cross Com- 
mission, composed of eighteen men, was on its way across 
the Atlantic. It reached France on June 13, 1917, 
the same date which saw the landing of General Pershing. 
Its arrival had not the same power to fire the popular 
imagination as the presence of the commander-in-chief, 
who was the physical symbol of our military cooperation. 
The broad character of the work which the American 
Red Cross had come to perform was not at the outset 
realized by the French, who took it for granted that the 
organization was merely supplementary to -the medical 
department of our coming expeditionary forces. 

Such was in truth the duty of the American Red Cross ; 
but though it was its first, it was not its sole duty. It 
had a second which was to serve the sick and wounded 
of the Allied Armies. It had assumed also a third obli- 
gation, to give as much assistance as it could to the civil 
sufferers of the war. It is because of this self-imposed 
third duty, so little comprehended at first, that the work of 
the American Red Cross in Prance will remain forever an 
imperishable monument to the high ideals of the people of 
the United States. 

The members of the Red Cross Commission were special- 
ists, men picked for their broad knowledge of the lines 
of endeavor along which their campaign was to be directed. 
They were experts on banking, on welfare work, and build- 
ing; on transportation and organization. They had not 
come merely to investigate and report to the War Council 



BEGINNINGS AND OUTLINES 11 

at home, but with the intention and, thanks to the generous 
size of their budget, the power to operate at once. 

Their first act was to get in touch with the French 
authorities and relief societies and through them to ascer- 
tain what the organization could do to carry out the mis- 
sion entrusted to it by the American people in the speediest 
and most effective manner. In addition to the relief work 
it hoped to accomplish among the French, the Red Cross 
had to prepare plans for hospital and canteen forma- 
tions against the time when the American Army should be 
in force upon the soil of France. It therefore naturally 
divided itself at once into the three main departments 
of Military Affairs, Civil Affairs, and Administration, 
each of which was sub-divided into a number of bureaus 
to facilitate the handling of various phases of the different 
activities. 

In adapting itself to the shifting conditions in France 
the organization of the American Red Cross went through 
a number of changes from first to last. Bureaus were 
abandoned as the need of their services ceased and others 
were merged for the sake of efficiency or transferred from 
one department to another. In general, however, though 
several new departments were ultimately added, the three 
formed at the outset continued to the end to be the 
central seats of the main activities. The work of the 
Military Department, except that part which had to do 
with French military affairs, and the relief work especially 
concerned with the situation in Belgium, are fully described 
in other volumes, the present one dealing only with the 
aid given directly to the French people. 

The work that lay in front of the Commission could 
not be fully visualized even with the counsel of the French 
authorities. It had to be approached more or less tenta- 
tively, the first steps being to ascertain the greatest needs 
and how the organized aid sent by the American people 
could be applied to meet them. 

After three years of the bloodiest warfare of history the 



12 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

combined power of France and England had proved un- 
equal to the task of driving Germany back to her bound- 
aries. A huge stretch of the richest portion of France 
was devastated or still in the hands of the enemy who 
at any moment threatened to sweep down upon and capture 
the capital itself. The ultimate victory still hung in the 
balance. ^N'ot only had France to put her all into the 
scale to save herself from a military defeat^ but behind 
the lines she was confronted by conditions that seriously 
affected her welfare. Several millions of refugees from 
the War Zone were in urgent need of proper housing, of 
food, clothing and medical care. Tuberculosis was spread- 
ing rapidly among the people, and thousands of children, 
deprived of suitable nourishing food, were drifting toward 
a state of ill health from which many could not hope to 
recover. 

This in brief was the situation. As a result of sugges- 
tions from the French government and its own investi- 
gations the American Eed Cross decided to assist France 
in meeting the problems concerned with : First — The 
refugees and other displaced populations outside of the 
War Zone. Second — The devastated area and the War 
Zone. Third — The reeducation of the mutiles, or disabled 
soldiers. Fourth — The care and prevention of tuber- 
culosis. Fifth — Child welfare. An equal number of 
bureaus were established under the Department of Civil 
Affairs to deal with these problems respectively. 

At the same time, under the Department of Military 
Affairs, a bureau of French Military Affairs was created 
to cooperate with the French in canteen and hospital work. 
The Eed Cross decided to engage in this work by special 
request of the French authorities. 'Not only was such 
assistance needed, particularly by the canteens, but the 
Government had in view the great moral effect that visible 
American cooperation would have among the French 
troops and the importance of making it evident at once. 

These several activities upon which the Eed Cross was 



BEGINNINGS AND OUTLINES 13 

about to embark entailed a vast amount of preliminary- 
organizing. All tbe existing private American relief 
agencies and societies working in France were, according 
to tbe express wish of the French government and the 
President of the United States, invited to merge their in- 
terests as thoroughly as possible with that of the Red 
Cross which was henceforth to act as the official distributor 
of America's funds and supplies for war relief in France. 
A personnel sufficient in size and capability to handle 
the work had to be engaged in the United States and 
shipped to France without delay; a Headquarters for the 
executive established in Paris ; arrangements made where- 
by the thirteen ports of France would receive goods 
destined for the American Red Cross; main and sub- 
warehouses bought, hired or built; hospital and canteen 
formations created and, as the French government held 
control of all railways, devoting them first and foremost 
to the use of its army requirements, a transportation 
system had to be built up that would serve the needs of the 
Red Cross. 

Starting with a personnel of about twenty, by January, 
1919, there were over six thousand men and women work- ' 
ing for the American Red Cross in France. The first 
1 ecomm endation of the Transportation Department for 
one hundred and fifty motor cars was considered by some 
at that time as absurdly large, but when the armistice 
was declared there were two thousand Red Cross cars in 
use. It might be added that in spite of these impressive 
figures the organization was frequently called upon to do 
emergency work that required a larger personnel and more 
means of transportation than it possessed. 

On arriving in France the American Red Cross found 
three existing relief organizations operating cars: the 
American Clearing House, the l^orton-Harjes Ambulance 
Service and the American Distributing Service. The 
latter two were distinctly and wholly devoted to carrying 
on hospital work, only the first named having to do with 



14 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

civilian service and this, mainly acting through French 
public channels as a sort of private express company 
to deliver packages from the United States. It had but 
six trucks and two cars of its own, nearly all in Paris. 
Manifestly for the plans of the American Eed Cross this 
was utterly inadequate. In taking over these three 
agencies the organization found by far the most important 
asset to be the long and valuable technical war experience 
of their leaders and men, and their knowledge of French 



As stated above the first recommendation of the 
Director of the Ked Cross Transportation Department 
for one hundred and fifty trucks, ambulances and Ford 
cars seemed to the committee at first sight foolishly waste- 
ful ; but comparing this with the final number — two thou- 
sand — at the end of hostilities, one realizes how the 
needs of the work developed and were recognized. There 
were only two ports, Bordeaux and Le Havre, where goods 
had been received by these American agencies. The trans- 
portation director saw that the Ked Cross must have ar- 
rangements in all the thirteen ports of France where 
American shipping entered, if it was to give effective serv- 
ice. These arrangements were ultimately made and for 
the eleven months following March 1, 1918, these thirteen 
ports received and handled over forty-six thousand tons 
of American Ked Cross merchandise. 

The every-day work and main function of the Transpor- 
tation Department was the movement and handling of 
freight. Starting at the ports, from the ship it proceeded 
to the port warehouse, thence to Paris (or after the de- 
partmental zone system was inaugurated to the zone central 
warehouse), thence to the interior sub-warehouse if not 
ordered directly to a hospital, canteen, etc. — and often 
from the last warehouse to the committee in the given de- 
partmental town or village which distributed necessities to 
the French refugees. All the long hauls were consigned 
to the French railways, but always under the care of the 



BEGINNINGS AND OUTLINES 15 

Transportation Department, and it required a prolonged, 
delicately adjusted series of negotiations with the Govern- 
ment authorities to obtain due recognition, on a par with 
war material, of American Red Cross freight and per- 
sonnel. There were often eig'ht distinct handlings of 
freight in France before it reached its final destination. 
A thorough system of checking and bills of lading, req- 
uisitioning, etc., was instituted, which showed every move- 
ment throughout the situations of its career of a piece or 
unit of freight, fixing responsibility for the handling and 
safe keeping of the same. This helps to account for the 
large expenditure attaching to this work as compared with 
the comparatively small tonnage of goods handled. 

In each of the thirteen ports, port-equipment and organi- 
zation were built up, varying from one manager and a 
clerk, to a personnel of three managers or associates, office 
helpers, thirty chauffeurs and garage workers, besides 
German prisoner labor or locally hired stevedores, with 
three large warehouses and fourteen motor cars, such as 
finally existed at Bordeaux. In nearly every depart- 
mental center where a Red Cross delegate had been in- 
stalled there had to be from one to three cars with com- 
petent drivers and arrangements to keep the transport 
work in adequate running order. 

There was also the building up of the Paris freight- 
service, developed from small beginnings of one railway 
quai and -^yq cars to an extensive system of railway quais 
and river docks, including warehouses in all parts of the 
city with all their managers, clerks, typists, checkers and 
stevedores ; and finally there was the " Motor Transport 
Corps," with its large personnel of drivers. All this meant 
training camps both at home and in France, garages, re- 
pair-shops in and outside of Paris, an efficient corps of 
skilled mechanics, carpenters, painters, etc., so that by 
January, 1919, there was in Paris and throughout France 
a total personnel of all kinds in the department of eleven 
hundred and sixty Americans. 



16 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

At first tlie Ked Cross tried to bring over all its cars in 
standardized parts from the United States; but ships' 
bottoms simply lacked room, so the organization was 
forced to buy in France whatever it could at any price to 
m.eet the first crying need. 

The complicated task of getting its house in order and 
laying out plans of operation was undertaken with char- 
acteristic energy and pushed through speedily, but it must 
be said that the Red Cross built itself up with one hand 
while it worked with the other. Two months after the 
Commission landed it had begun to give assistance to the 
French in the form of monetary contributions to provide 
proper housing facilities for the refugees miserably 
crowded together in the poorer sections of Paris. Almost 
at the same time, as the workers for whom it had cabled 
Washington began to arrive in France, the organization 
embarked upon the other selected activities; cooperation 
with the rolling-canteens at the French front, French hos- 
pitals and schools for the reeducation of the disabled 
soldiers, and societies concerned with child-welfare work 
and the prevention of tuberculosis. 

The idea at the outset was to have at least one repre- 
sentative of the American Red Cross in each Department 
of France to superintend the relief work among the refu- 
gees therein. Great difficulty was found in securing 
trained workers for this purpose, but little by little the 
staff was built up. The first relief delegates were actually 
sent out to the Provinces in December, 1917. By the end 
of the summer of 1918 the American Red Cross Bureau 
of Refugees was represented in every Department outside 
of the War Zone by a delegate clothed with broad powers 
and supported by a completely organized system of trans- 
port and supplies at Headquarters. A special Bureau 
of the War Zone was alsb created which endeavored to pro- 
vide relief for the civilian population as they fled from or 
retu-rned to that area according to the movements of the 
contending armies. 



BEGINNINGS AND OUTLINES 17 

During the same period the Children's Bureau was 
represented bj activities in all the large centers of popu- 
lation such as Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Dijon, 
etc., comprising dispensaries, refuges, creches, school- 
lunches, and, more fundamentally, careful educational 
campaigns that put before the people in an attractive 
manner all the principles of child-welfare work. 

Similarly, the work of the Tuberculosis Bureau was 
marked by extremely thoughtful surveys of the entire 
country, with consistent instructive assistance to existing 
French institutions and the establishment of four large 
institutions of its own. 

Close collaboration with the intensive and effective 
work of the Friends' Unit gave the keynote to the char- 
acter of much of the social work. 

The activities of all these bureaus necessarily over- 
lapped, some dispensaries existing under the management 
of the Bureau of Refugees and some relief work under the 
other bureaus. In the following chapters it was not con- 
sidered necessary always to make a sharp distinction. 

The outstanding feature of the entire work was the 
broad and comprehensive foundation upon which it was 
built, which was made possible by the experience and 
vision of the men chosen to inaugurate it and carry it on. 

To help France to help herself was the thought at the 
back of every effort in every bureau. The delegates of 
the Bureau of Refugees recommended that American Red 
Cross clothing and furniture should be sold, at cost prices 
or less, rather than given to the refugee population, thus 
recognizing that they were not dealing with an indigent 
people, but with one that was temporarily suffering from 
causes beyond its control. America offered the hand of a 
friend to a friend in need and in no sense assumed the at- 
titude of a benefactress. 

Has this effort left its impress upon France? Will 
anything permanent remain to indicate the immense ex- 
penditure of energy and material so bountifully and gladly 



18 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

contributed by the men, women, and children of the United 
States? We are perhaps too near to see clearly the an- 
swer to these questions, but of the grateful appreciation 
of that portion of the French people which from personal 
experience knows the work accomplished and the manner 
in which it was done, there can be small doubt. Unques- 
tionably also our methods of organization and directness of 
action, and particularly the American idea (not new in 
theory but actually new in practice in France) of re- 
sponsibility to the community and of social service, have 
made a deep impression. That the men and women who 
have done the work of civilian relief in France will take 
back to the United States an appreciation of the privilege 
given them in carrying out the mandate of the American 
people, there can be no shadow of doubt whatsoever. 



CHAPTER III 

WITH FRENCH HOSPITALS 

SOON" after the outbreak of the war the American Red 
Gross organized an expedition for relief work 
abroad. The S.S. Bed Cross, chartered by the association, 
crossed the Atlantic in September, 1914, carrying sur- 
geons and nurses and a large amount of medical supplies 
for the warring nations of Europe without regard to na- 
tionality. The field was vast and the little force, broken 
up into its various units, was widely scattered and almost 
overwhelmed by the needs of the situation. They accom- 
plished excellent work, but in most cases their existence 
was comparatively ephemeral. The unit dispatched to 
Erance equipped at Pan a hospital of two hundred beds 
which it operated for one year. Its personnel was then 
removed, part of it being transferred to Belgium. Eor 
eight months or so another unit assisted Dr. Eitch in 
his orthopedic work for the Erench Army. The Ameri- 
can Ambulance at ^N'euilly was helped by the organiza- 
tion, and various Erench institutions were given aid in the 
form of money, supplies, or personnel for certain periods 
of time, but the plan of the American Red Cross was 
not to concentrate its activities for the benefit of any one 
nation, but to distribute them as impartially as pos- 
sible. 

With the entry of the United States into the war this 
plan was automatically changed. The Red Cross became 
the official American relief organization and made ready 
to put at the disposal of the A. E. F. and their allies 
all the resources with which the people of the United 

19 



20 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

States had. generously endowed it. Soon after its arrival 
in France, following upon conferences with the Govern- 
ment, it began among other activities its plans for hospital 
cooperation with the French. In accordance with these 
plans the Medical Department of the Eed Cross took com- 
plete control over some existing hospitals, assisted others 
and inaugurated new but similar activities, such as the 
invaluable dispensary work for the civilian population at 
those points which, through the exigencies of war, were 
most in need of medical aid. 

The main object of the Medical Department was to 
prepare plans and collect supplies) against the future 
hospital needs of the American Army. Its activities with 
and in behalf of the French Army were secondary, but in 
most cases these redounded to the advantage of our own 
men as well. A few hospitals, such as E'os. 1 and 2, were 
operated with the deliberate intention of caring for the 
wounded of both nations. 'No. 1, originally the Ameri- 
can Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, was supported and 
run by the Eed Cross and the United States Army, and 
its -Qye hundred or more beds and its dental clinic were 
at the disposal of the French. In connection with this 
formation the Eed Cross maintained a thoroughly equipped 
sanitary train to bring back the French wounded from 
the front and an ambulance service that carried the 
wounded for the Paris district. Though the director was 
an American Army officer the Eed Cross had the entire 
medical and surgical management of the hospital. 

No. 2, formerly known as Dr. Blake's hospital, had 
like No. 1 been one of the chief relief activities 
through which American sympathy for the French found 
practical expression during the first years of the war. Of 
its three hundred beds, one hundred were reserved for 
French wounded. In this hospital was situated the Eed 
Cross Eesearch Laboratory where a corps of bacteriologists 
carried on a series of important investigations into the 
original causes of maladies common to soldiers. 



WITH FRENCH HOSPITALS 21 

At Annel, Cugny, Evreiix, and Soissons existing hos- 
pitals were taken over bj the Red Cross and operated for 
the French soldiers, and a fifth was constructed at Neuf- 
chateau for the civil population in connection with the 
Red Cross dispensary work whose center was established 
in that town. Diet kitchens were contributed to a 
number of hospitals to provide for the needs of those 
who were too ill to take the regular hospital fare and 
these proved to be of great assistance to the doctors in 
feeding patients suffering from wounds in the jaw. As 
in the case of Franco-American canteen cooperation an 
amount of data was gathered in the course of these early 
hospital activities — the kitchen collected a large store 
of special diet delicacies as well — that later on were use- 
ful to the Eed Cross in its work with our own forces. 

The branch of Red Cross hospital cooperation with the 
French that was most widely spread was the so-called 
Service de SantSj the need of which arose out of the 
situation caused by the brigading of American troops with 
the armies of our allies. Under this brigading system it 
was obvious that many of our wounded, instead of being 
cared for at our own hospitals, must be sent directly to 
those belonging to the French and English medical corps. 
The French especially were short of nursing personnel, 
but the Red Cross did not undertake the work with the 
view of relieving the French of this extra burden, the 
realization that the presence of a woman from their own 
country would prove a factor of importance in the welfare 
of our wounded soldiers who might be sent among foreign- 
ers, playing a large part in its decision. 

Every one concerned saw that the situation could be 
best handled through the American Red Cross and accord- 
ingly the United States Army requested the organization 
to take care of such cases as might occur. An arrange- 
ment was entered into with the French Service de Sante 
by which their hospital officials were instructed to send 
notifications of the arrival of any American wounded to 



22 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the Red Cross which was then expected to fumish units 
to care for such patients. These units were composed of 
a nurse and a Erench-speaking aid who in addition to her 
routine work was expected to act as interpreter. On ar- 
riving at the hospital to which they had been sent they 
reported to the Medecin Chef who assigned them to their 
duties and returned them, on the evacuation of the Ameri- 
can patients, to the Eed Cross, or if an emergency arose 
obtained permission from that organization to reassign 
them to some other French hospital where their services 
were needed. 

The system was flexible and permitted of that quick, 
concerted action so important in all medical work. Its 
results were even more gratifying than had been expected. 
The units not only brought the abundance of the Red Cross 
to the lonely American wounded, but also a professional 
skill that was superior to that of the French nurses. More- 
over, as the latter were no more proficient in the English 
language than the great majority of the American soldiers 
were in the French, the difficulties of communication be- 
tween them can be imagined. 

For example a Red Cross nurse on arriving at a French 
hospital found a number of the personnel in consultation 
over her prospective patient. She had been notified that 
his injuries were severe and this ominous bedside gathering 
pointed to a hemorrhage or a collapse. She was quickly 
reassured by the look of relief and hope that appeared 
on the doughboy's face when he saw her and his heartfelt 
exclamation : " For God's sake, Miss, tell them I'm com- 
fortable ! " The soldier had sneezed while asleep and the 
convulsive movement had changed the position of one of 
his legs, both of which were broken. The French nurse 
came to his aid and straightened the leg, but when he tried 
to tell her that she had made him comfortable she imagined 
the reverse and in attempting, with the help of several 
orderlies, to better conditions for the patient, was making 
matters decidedly worse. Instances of this kind, of a 



WITH FRENCH HOSPITALS 23 

lesser or a graver nature, were constantly occurring when 
no American nurses were in attendance. 

As had 'been foreseen the companionship of the Red 
Cross nurse was of tonic value to the American stranded 
in a French hospital. He felt sure of her sympathy and 
had confidence in her ability. She brought him also ma- 
terial comforts in the shape of fruit, eggs, milk, chicken, 
chocolate, tobacco: delicacies ordinarily unobtainable in 
French hospitals and for the purchase of which each nurse 
was allowed a certain amoimt of money by the Red Cross. 
The breakfast that sufficed for the poilu did not satisfy 
the sturdy doughboy — he did not " pick up '' on it as 
one says — and it was the business of the nurse to add to 
the menu what his appetite demanded. She ^vrote his 
letters when he was unable to handle a pen, and if he was 
troubled about his home affairs she set the machinery of the 
Home Service Department of the Red Cross to work upon 
the case. She brought him magazines and papers and gifts 
from the stores of the organization, pajamas, toilet articles, 
back-rests, hot-water bags, games — all the dozen and one 
comforts of the sick-room. 

Sometimes however she encountered wants that the or- 
ganization had not foreseen. In one of the wards in charge 
of a Red Cross unit an Arabian officer was received. He 
was a victim of mustard gas and so fearfully burned that 
the hands of the nurses were blistered as they undressed 
him. His pride, however, was paramount to his sufferings 
and the degTadation of being put to bed in a white night- 
gown was a thing not to be borne. Drawing up his bleed- 
ing body to its full height, he demanded a " shirt of color." 
Ig-norant of the indignity involved the nurses endeavored 
to make him wear the nightgown ; but the chieftain reso- 
lutely refused it and, not obtaining the substitute he 
wanted, put himself between the clean sheets and died thus, 
naked and true to his principles. 

From another and more important angle the anecdote 



24 AMERICAN EED CROSS IN FRANCE 

also throws light upon the situation as it developed in the 
wards of these French hospitals. Originally inte];ided to 
look after our own men the system happily proved to be of 
considerable benefit to the French and the soldiers of other 
nations fighting at her side. It seldom happened that the 
number of American patients in any one French hospital 
at a given time was large, often not more than three or 
four, too few to exact full working time from the Red 
Cross nurses who therefore invariably made a point of 
sharing in the care of the rest of the ward. With the 
other nurses they tended th(^ sick and wounded French, 
British, Australian, Senegambian, Siamese, all the un- 
fortunates whatever their nationality that drifted in from 
the polyglot forces. And these well-trained women, su- 
perior as a rule in skill, education and initiative to their 
French companions, accomplished an enormous amount of 
work in a way that was equally satisfactory to both doctors 
and patients. 

It not infrequently occurred that a unit would be asked 
for to meet an expected influx of American patients who 
failed to materialize after all at that particular hospital. 
The nurses then remained to work among the French while 
awaiting another call which might not come for a month 
or two. In such intervals their cooperation was naturally 
of the greatest assistance to the physicians who, as already 
stated, rarely had a sufficiently large nursing personnel 
at their command. Even when there were American 
patients the French largely outnumbered them in the 
majority of cases and they shared not only the professional 
attentions of the Eed Cross nurses, but also the delicacies 
and other gifts the organization provided. A punctilious 
distribution of these extras among all the patients of their 
ward was regularly observed by the nurses. Instances 
where small numbers of American wounded came and 
went with long gaps between, during which the Red Cross 
units were busy at the French triage hospitals, where the 
wounded men were first received, are frequently registered 



WITH FRENCH HOSPITALS 25 

in the nurses' reports and on the other side the Trench 
records show the high valuation set on the fine, disinter- 
ested service performed bv these women. 

The strenuous and varied work the Red Cross nurses 
were called upon to perform is well illustrated by the case 
of a unit sent to Coulommiers when the Germans at 
Chateau-Thierry were being forced back by American 
troops. On the arrival of the unit at the French hospital 
that had issued the call it found that all the American 
wounded were being taken care of at one of our own evacua- 
tion hospitals. A train-load of fifteen hundred American 
patients, however, was being sent on to Nantes that night 
in charge of French personnel, none of whom could speak 
a word of English. The nurses gladly accepted the op- 
portunity to be of service to these men en route. Hurry- 
ing from the hospital they reached the station just in time 
to catch the train and during the eighteen hour journey 
that followed they were on their feet practically every 
moment, explaining the wants of the patients to the order- 
lies, calling the attention of the doctor to the worst cases, 
and easing in innumerable ways the discomforts and 
sufferings of their countrymen. 

The next day they returned to their starting point and 
were assigned to the triage hospital to care for the French 
petits blesses. For four weeks they devoted themselves to 
this work, at the end of which time the American evacua- 
tion hospital moved from the town, leaving those of its 
patients who were too ill to be taken, in the care of the 
Red Cross unit. American wounded were also beginning 
to arrive from the field and these also were nursed by the 
two Red Cross women. These men were scattered about 
the big rambling French hospital, one here and one there, 
wherever there was a bed to receive them, which did not 
simplify the duties of their attendants. Yet the nurse 
and her aid found spare moments enough to run a little 
kitchen from v/hich they served eggs, tea, toast, and jam 



26 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

to the men of an American division passing tlirough on its 
way to tlie front. Hardly was this extra work finished 
when twenty new patients were brought to them from a 
near by camp of engineers into which a German aeroplane 
had dropped a bomb. 

Then the virulent Spanish influenza swept through the 
region and the Red Cross unit was called upon for aid. 
Fortunately the majority of the American wounded had 
been evacuated. The nurses were put in charge of about 
one hundred French soldiers down with the disease and 
they were still nursing them when once more the inter- 
rupted stream of wounded, who had a prior claim for at- 
tention, began to flow in. In the middle of October the 
unit was recalled to Paris after three months of duty 
which, though less monotonous than the experiences of 
some, was not more arduous. The proving of the mental 
and physical stamina of the women who enlisted in this 
and similar forms of Red Cross service was one of the strik- 
ing facts demonstrated by the war. 

Where all duties were so faithfully and efficiently done 
it is rather invidious to give special mention to any one 
piece of work, but for several reasons that of Dr. Fitch's 
hospital was of more than ordinary importance. In the 
first place the Red Cross had given this hospital assistance 
early in the war. At the end of eight months it had with- 
drawn the unit lent and terminated its official connection 
with the hospital, then stationed at St. V"alery-en-Caux ; 
but it had continued to send frequent gifts of money and 
supplies. In particular one Red Cross Chapter in the 
state of 'New York never failed throughout the war to 
contribute a regular monthly sum toward its support. 

In 1917, at the request of the French authorities, the 
hospital with its American staff moved to Evreux to take 
charge of all the bone surgery of the French Third region. 
The French assumed all the expenses of the hospital except 
the salaries of the staff whose income depended upon dona- 
tions irregularly received from friends at home. Such a 



WITH FRENCH HOSPITALS 27 

preoarious arrangemeiit made its preservation something 
of a problem and as tlie Red Cross was anxious to affiliate 
with itself all American relief organizations the hospital at 
Evreux welcomed the opportunity for an alliance. 

By the conditions under which this was consummated 
the Red Cross guaranteed to supply a sufficient number of 
nurses and pay them their salaries as well as the running 
expenses of the staff, to which it added a bacteriologist ; it 
also provided that most necessary adjunct to an orthopedic 
hospital, a well-equipped laboratory, and a recreation 
building for convalescents. The object of the formation 
remained the same; that is, it was still a French military 
hospital. 

The spring offensive of 1918 wrought many changes. 
The loss of territory suffered by the French with the con- 
sequent loss of hospital formations made necessary a rapid 
preparation of new accommodations for the wounded. As 
fivreux offered a good opportunity for enlargement the 
Red Cross asked permission of the French government to 
take over the formation for the time and put it at the dis- 
posal of American as well as French wounded. The re- 
quest was granted and the Red Cross raised the number 
of beds from three hundred and fifty to about seven hun- 
dred and fifty, paying all the expenses of construction and 
furnishing all the needed supplies. 

The beds were filled almost before they were ready. 
The doctors were busy in the operating rooms all day long 
and on the arrival of each new batch of patients the nurses 
were often called upon to work as much as eighteen hours 
at a stretch, sometimes with no time off for meals. One 
large convoy of Americans was received in July and our 
wounded frequently came in with the French convoys, but 
the majority of cases were French. In the citation re- 
ceived by one of th^ Red Cross nurses of this unit the 
French spoke of their affection for these women who had 
come so far to dress their wounds. 

From the first of October till the hospital was returned 



gS AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

to the French at the end of December the Eed Cross "bore 
all expenses, though the French Medecin Chef and per- 
sonnel, such as the orderlies and the maids, were kept. 
During this period very few of the beds were ever empty. 
The Red Cross work at Evreux did not end here. There 
were refugees as well as wounded soldiers in the town and 
the Red Cross fed and clothed hundreds that passed 
through and gave employment to many who stayed. The 
field of its activities included the civil population of the 
town which was almost entirely without medical and sur- 
gical aid. Influenza and other diseases were rife and the 
Red Cross units did all in their power to help the sick and 
the needy. 

The service was one demanding great tact and adapta- 
bility of the Red Cross units since in every case they were 
under the direction of French physicians and surgeons who 
were not accustomed to our system of nursing. To the 
credit of both parties the results were even more gratifying 
than had been expected. The Red Cross women left a 
record behind them with which they can well be satisfied ; 
but they could not have accomplished all that they did if 
it had not been for the appreciative attitude of the French. 
The best accommodations obtainable and the most courteous 
treatment were always given the units who were made to 
feel that the nation was grateful for their cooperation. 

A French surgeon who came in contact with our units 
was so favorably impressed that he planned to establish a 
model training school after the war with an American head 
nurse, which should not only train French nurses after our 
standards but also attract an equally fine class of women 
into the service. It is not improbable that the demonstra- 
tion of American nursing methods may arouse a general 
desire among the French medical profession to have a 
similar corps of nurses in their own country. If this 
should happen it would not be one of the least gratifying 
results of Rferd Cross relations with the French, 



CHAPTEE lY 

OANTINES AU FRONT 

AT the time when the Red Cross, by the advice of the 
French authorities, decided to assist in the founding 
and maintenance of canteens at the French front, the rail- 
way systems were badly congested. When one considers 
the situation in detail the wonder grows that their service 
was as effective as it was. At the outset of hostilities they 
had suffered a double blow in the I'oss of some forty-five 
thousand cars and locomotives and the main source of their 
fuel supply, the coal fields of the north. It was difficult 
indeed to make good the loss of the first ; in fact through- 
out the war it was almost impossible to find time to make 
even the repairs necessary to keep the rolling-stock in work- 
ing order. There was always not only a shortage of stock 
and fuel, but also of the skilled railway labor urgently 
needed to replace that drafted into the army. 

After 1915 the seven armies of France exacted for their 
maintenance the use of two himdred trains a day, a figure 
that does not include those required for the British forces. 
Outside of these supply trains the movement to and from 
the front of soldiers and men engaged in military affairs 
was enormous. The Orleans system alone transported in 
1917 more than eight million such passengers. Italy, who 
had always depended upon Germany for the bulk of her 
coal, was now obliged to get it from England, via the 
burdened railways of France. In addition to all the 
strictly emergency traffic there had to be kept up the great 
volume of that normal one necessary to the life of the civil 
population and its commercial transactions. 

29 



30 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

Broadly speakings the principle on which the French 
systems had been constructed was the linking of Paris to 
all the ports and the chief cities of France. The war 
created new currents that neither the main nor the trans- 
verse lines could take. The advent of the American 
troops, who had to be transported to widely scattered 
camps and billets and supplied with everything necessary 
to their maintenance, increased largely this particular diffi- 
culty. To cope with the situation France was obliged to 
build new lines while laboring to meet the demands on the 
existing ones. In all she constructed seven thousand 
kilometers during the war, besides a large number of 
freight-yards, storehouses, and terminals. 

These are a few of the more prominent features of the 
railway tangle that complicated her task and that of the 
American Eed Cross as well. It is necessary to bear them 
in mind; but there is no intention here to criticize the 
personnel of the systems, whose admirable and devoted 
service merits the highest praise. 

The congestion of traffic brought much discomfort and 
even suffering to the French troops passing through the 
railway stations daily in great numbers. Thousands were 
detained en route, often for more than a day or a night, 
packed in close cars or encamped by the side of the track 
without shelter and with little or no food. If it was night 
they slept on the bare ground, whatever the weather. 
There was a stimulus at the front that raised the soldier 
above himself, but back of the lines he became an ordinary 
human being. In the reaction that set in there he had the 
time and the inclination to think of his aches and pains ; of 
his empty belly, his cold and foul person, and the vermin 
with which he was infested. If his home was far away 
he often had no place in which to spend his permission. If 
he was returning to the front the horrors he must face 
gained additional weight by contrast with the comfort and 
security of the fireside he was leaving. It was the hour 
when his spirits were at their lowest, when he could appro- 



CANTINES AU FRONT 31 ' 

ciate most keenly any sympathetic effort to contribute to 
his welfare. 

The French were quite alive to the mental condition of 
the soldier under such circumstances. One of their gen- 
erals had sent the following warning to the War Ministry : 
" In view of keeping up the spirits of the troops it is in- 
dispensable that soldiers on leave be able to find, while 
waiting at railway stations in the course of their journeys, 
canteens which will allow them to .have comfortable rest 
and refreshment. Good results have already been attained 
in that direction, but it is necessary to improve the canteens 
already existing and to create new ones in stations that do 
not have them.'' 

Such was the situation to which the attention of the 
American Red Cross had been directed and to the better- 
ment of which it at once took steps. 'No other plan could 
have assured the giving of material aid to the soldier so 
promptly or opened a surer means for the wide dissemina- 
tion among the army of the news that America was actually 
in the war. 

The types of existing French canteens were three: port- 
able ones operating at the front; those operating on the 
lines of communication, called L.O.C. canteens, and the 
metropolitan canteens, which were established in Paris 
and on the Grande Ceinture, sl belt line that forms a wide 
circle round the capital and connects the railways of the 
East, Vincennes, Lyon, and Orleans. This line made it 
possible to carry the troops going beyond Paris in any di- 
rection, around instead of through that teeming city. The 
threefold system worked out by the French was well-de- 
signed to meet their most pressing canteen needs, but 
owing to the lack of money and personnel the plan had not 
been fully carried out. It was to supply the deficiencies 
in the operation of the system that the American Red Cross 
was asked to give its assistance to the canteen service. 

During the period of its conferences with the French 
authorities on the matter of active participation the Red 



32 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

Cross contributed large quantities of supplies to some of 
the more needy Metropolitan canteensw Its next step was 
a direct cooperation with the French Army service at the 
front. It undertook to finance fifteen of the portable or 
^^ rolling " canteens (the number was more than doubled 
later) ; to provide all the requisite foodstuffs and new 
material and to send one Ked Cross representative to each 
crew as a working member thereof. The French had in- 
troduced this type in 1917 with great success, placing 
them under the control of the Sanitary Corps. A crew 
consisted of not more than three men including the chief, 
or conveyer, to whom was given the honorary rank of Sec- 
ond Lieutenant. As a rule they were men who through 
wounds received in the war or other disabilities were 
physically unfit for fighting. Sons of titled families, 
many of them, they cleaned their kitchens, chopped wood 
for the fires or drew water as faithfully as their peasant 
companions. 

These little canteens tucked themselves in as; close as 
possible behind the front lines. For the first seven months 
of the Ked Cross service the French troops were compara- 
tively stable, but in March and thereafter, when the Ger- 
mans began their new drive, followed by counter attacks 
of the Allies, came a succession of violent bending move- 
ments, great oscillations of the lines, that added fresh diffi- 
culties to the situation. The canteens had to carry out 
their duties with the same exactitude demanded of the rest 
of the army. Whatever the fluctuations of the section to 
which they were attached they were expected to be at their 
posts sooner or later. The majority were therefore under 
fire practically every day and for this reason they usually 
operated only at night or between the hours of 2 a. m. and 
the first flush of dawn when there was the least danger 
from the shells of the enemy. After daybreak the French 
troops were not allowed to gather at the '^ stations " as the 
enemy were always quick to discover such tempting targets. 

Only liquids such as tea, coffee, bouillon, cocoa, or 



CANTINES AU FRONT 33 

chocolate and lemonade were served. Water could be ob- 
tained wherever the little mobile kitchen was established 
and such solid ingredients as were used could easily be 
carried. A fire — frequently made from the splintered 
beams of a shattered house — the small blue cart and the 
steaming metal marmites constituted the station, which 
more often than not was posted on the cross-roads ; deadly 
spots but convenient for intercepting the troops in their 
shadowy ebb and flow. 

Granted time enough to settle down to their savory work 
these methodical little cantines au front threw out advance 
posts, in many cases to within one or two hundred yards of 
the German lines. Roughly each canteen covered a sector 
about twelve miles in length. From their outposts they 
reached the fighting men in the chill and slime of the first 
trenches or waiting tensely for the word to execute or repel 
a long-expected attack. The carrier from the canteen, 
his hidon or can strapped on his back, made his way out to 
the annexes, sometimes with his belly to the ground like 
an Indian on a stalk, and picking his course by the white 
slash of the enemy's star-shells. He had his reward in the 
welcome of the poilus. Those hidons of hot, well-sugared 
chocolate put heart into many a man weakened by cold, 
fatigue, and nervous strain. 

" Before leaving this sector I wish most particularly 
to thank you, on my own behalf, and in the name of all my 
brave old poilus for the inestimable service that your can- 
teens at the front have rendered in the Vosges. ... I beg 
you to express to the American Red Cross my deepest 
thanks and also the gra-titude of my brave soldiers who, 
during the last winter in the mountains, benefited so 
greatly from the generous donations of your society," wrote 
Colonel De Vaux of the French Army to a Red Cross con- 
voyer. General Remond praises the work of another can- 
teen. " The men of my division have particularly bene- 
fited by the distribution of hot drinks which the American 
Red Cross Canteen established near Verdun, served out 



34 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

every night with unliniited and touching activity to the 
detachments coming down from the lines. I desire in the 
name of my soldiers to say to you with all my heart: 
^ Thanks.' They do not forget any more than I do the 
work that the American Eed Cross is doing and the de- 
votion with which you presided at the distribution at all 
hours of the night." These are but brief examples of 
many letters written in the same tenor. 

A few of the stations were on comparatively quiet sec- 
tors, but where the French troops were there was usually 
enough action to ensure the conveyer a life of excitement 
and danger with plenty of hard work thrown in. Often 
he lived like a marmot during his daylight hours, lying in 
an abri or a corner of a wrecked building, or under some 
improvised shelter, emerging at nightfall to resume his 
duties. Most of the time he was quite as cold and wet 
and lousy as any of the poilus he served. He stood by his 
rolling kitchen as the artilleryman stood by his gun and 
when the line bent back it was up to him to see that his 
paraphernalia did not fall into the hands of the enemy. 

These canteens were so close to the lines, however, that 
an effective withdrawal was not always possible. That at 
Chalons-sur-Vesle, about seven miles west of Kheims, was 
captured with all its supplies during the German attack in 
May. The main post at Mont de Senilly, north of 
Soissons, was destroyed by shells in the March drive. A 
new station was set up at Chavigny, only to be captured 
by the enemy two months later. The canteens at the 
Ferme de Monaco, Koncey, and Eilly-la-Montagne were 
either captured or destroyed. A number of the workers 
were wounded and one Eed Cross convoyer was killed by 
the explosion of a shell. Several received citations and 
the Croix de Guerre for bravery and devotion to duty 
under heavy fire. 

After the fall of 1917 the canteens served in all the 
major operations on the' French front ; in the notable battles 
of La Malmaison and Flanders?; the great German drives 



CANTINES AU FRONT 35 

of March and May; the French counter-stroke of July 18 ; 
in all the subsequent fighting of the First, Third, and 
Tenth Armies and in the Champagne offensive of Sep- 
tember, 1918. 

The value of the v^ork done by the conveyers v^as out of 
all proportion to their comparatively small number. A 
total of nearly six million drinks v^ere served by them and 
at just those moments when the soldiers most needed and 
could not otherwise obtain such physical stimulants ; but of 
even greater importance perhaps was the significance of 
their presence. They visualized for the fighting poilus, 
many of whom never came in contact with any other Ajner- 
icans, our actual participation in the war. They had 
heard we were coming and they were watching for us. 
With what eagerness is shown by their response to the ar- 
rival of the Red Cross conveyers for though the personnel 
of the little canteens was usually two-thirds French, they 
immediately became known as " the American canteens.'^ 
It was this waiting chord that the Ked Cross hoped to 
strike at once, by this and other means, because a success- 
ful touch upon it meant the transmission of hope and con- 
fidence along the weary French front. 



CHAPTER V 

CANTINES DBS DEUX DRAPE AUX 

THE arteries of the War Zone area along whose western 
rim the battle raged, were the French lines of com- 
munication. To and fro on the railways covering this 
zone, roughly corresponding in size to the State of IsTew 
York, there was an incessant movement of an enormous 
number of fresh troops, of exhausted men on permission 
and on temporary billets, and of wounded soldiers. As the 
French authorities had advised, the situation offered to the 
Red Cross another obvious channel along which its message 
could flow. 

By the terms on which the L.O.C. canteen collaboration 
was finally settled the French were required to furnish the 
necessary buildings and provide electric light, running 
water and coal for heating purposes, while the Red Cross 
undertook to supply the cooking appliances, the coal for 
cooking, all the medical and equipment stores and the per- 
sonnel. Later the Red Cross was allowed to purchase sup- 
plies of the French commissariat at military rates, with- 
out which proviso it could hardly have carried out its share 
of the contract. 

With such an arrangement in force the Red Cross de- 
clared itself ready to serve a meal of hot soup, roast meat, 
vegetables, bread and coffee for seventy-five centimes a 
head, with various extras like eggs, salads, jams, ham, etc., 
no one of which should cost more than thirty centimes. 
Beer, wine and spirits were prohibited in all the American 
Red Cross canteens. These conditions were accepted by 
the French, who submitted a list of stations where the need 
of American assistance was most urgent, and on September 

36 
/ 



CANTINES DES DEUX DRAPEAUX 37 

17, 1917, the first canteen on the lines of coinmnnication 
was opened at Chalons-sur-Marne. In October one was 
established at Epemay and later at each of the following 
stations, Orry-la-Ville, Snrvilliers, and St. Germain-des- 
Eosses. The cooperation of France and the United States 
was symbolized in a way that no soldier, no matter how 
unlettered, could misinterpret, by signboards bearing the 
tricolor and the Stars and Stripes, and the canteens were 
known officially as the Cantines des Deux Drapeaux. 

The canteens in some cases were single buildings, in 
others groups of three, four, or five, depending upon the 
size and importance of their " business/' Their low, 
barrack-like shape and the necessity of placing them in the 
railroad yards, or as close to the stations as possible, did not 
make for external picturesqueness, but efforts' were never 
lacking to give them an air of comfort. Sometimes small 
gardens and vines relieved the general bareness and in- 
ternally at least the general effect was attractive, thanks to 
the French camouflage artists who decorated the walls with 
skillful, simple designs in color. This was not so small a 
matter as might appear for the spirits of every soldier 
from the camp or the trench responded gratefully to sur- 
roundings that pleased his eye. The poilu was perhaps 
particularly susceptible to the appeal of the artistic. 

Generally speaking the operating system of all the 
Cantines des Deux Drapeaux was the same. The large 
ones were kept open night and day by a small force of at- 
tendants who worked in rotation in six-hour shifts. One 
attendant presided at a desk near the door of the building 
where the food was served. The soldier as he entered 
bought his meal tickets at this desk and passed on to a 
counter divided by three partitions. At the first compart- 
ment he received his bowl of soup together with a fork and 
spoon for which he paid thirty centimes apiece, the money 
being refunded when the implements were returned, a 
process not always understood by the economical poilu. 
At the second division a third attendant handed him his 



38 AMERICAN EED CROSS IN FRANCE 

meat, vegetables, and bread, and at tbe last a f onrtb sup- 
plied the cup of coffee or chocolate. French assistants kept 
bowls and meat plates filled and ready for the attendants to 
hand out. This simple system ensured speed without con- 
fusion and enabled the Eed Cross workers to come directly 
into contact with the French soldiers. In addition there 
was a Directress or " housekeeper," who attended to the 
buying and distribution of all supplies, kept the accounts, 
looked after the laundry, cut the bread for the next shift — 
a matter of ninety pounds or so at the large canteens — 
and weighed the garbage, bones, and bread crumbs, all of 
which were frugally sold to various purchasers, so that her 
position had its duties as well as its honors. 

At stations like Chalons-sur-Marne and Epemay for ex- 
ample the canteen proper had several annexes. Between 
T :30 A. M. and 9 a. m. the canteen shut its doors while its 
floor was swept and fresh sawdust spread upon it and its 
tables cleaned. In that interval the soldiers could get 
bread and coffee at the " foyer " whose main purpose was 
that of a room for rest and recreation. They found there 
writing materials and magazines, checkers and cards, and 
for those who liked music there was a phonograph and a 
piano. In summer the soldiers, after the French custom, 
often sat in the garden, but the foyer was always the 
favorite lounging place and every evening — the custom 
was to keep it open till 11 p. m. — it was patronized to the 
point of suffocation. 

To realize what these canteen units meant to the poilus 
one must understand the conditions of railway travel as 
they were at that time. The soldiers were packed into the 
trains like cattle, till each car contained nearly double its 
ordinary quota of passengers. The first few to get aboard 
obtained seats, when there were any seats, but the majority 
had to stand for hours, sweltering in the heat or shivering 
with cold according to the season. The journeys were al- 
most invariably performed under cover of the darkness, 
and sleep was practically unobtainable even for the most 



CANTINES DES DEUX DRAPEAUX 39 

weary. The air soon became so intolerably stale and so 
beavy with tobacco smoke tbat the men were balf suffo- 
cated. Tbey could not ease their cramped limbs by a 
change of position as they were jaromed together in a mass 
so compact that no one could move unless he moved a 
neighbor also. Efforts to obtain relief in this direction 
were seldom repeated, but occasionally the train on being 
sharply shunted to a. side track or in rounding a curve ac- 
complished a violent shifting of its gargo en masse to the 
accompaniment of oaths and groans. It was the epitome 
of discomfort and when the cars finally drew up at a sta- 
tion and disgorged their sore, exasperated contents the 
physical and mental cheer of the canteen was absorbed as 
gratefully by the poilus as parched soil drinks of a summer 
shower. 

One can realize how agreeable it must have been to talk 
with the attendants in their crisp costumes ; to be seized 
with hot stimulating drinks and good food in a clean and 
pleasant room; to rest and sing and write letters if one 
wished ; in a word, to feel that one had risen from a mere 
cipher in a driven herd to the dignity of a human being. 
And nothing counted more in this renewal of spirits and 
self-respect than the presence of the gracious, loyal women. 
It gave the final subtle touch. Courage and chivalry the 
man's part ; devotion the woman's. That these capped and 
aproned women had cared enough to cross the ocean in 
order to serve France in this menial capacity showed the 
poilu that America's heart and hand were with him. It is 
not to be doubted that the knowledge of this was of some 
benefit to his morale. 

Sometimes unlucky troops passed through these stations 
that were allowed to disembark only for a few minutes, or 
not at all, and then the canteen ^' platform service " came 
into play. Rapidity was an essential element of all the 
work at all times, but on such occasions there was a race 
against time and often a losing one; but the majority of the 
men received a hot drink and the disappointed ones^ being 



40 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

Frenclmien, were gallant enough to take the will for the 
deed. The speed at which the attendants were obliged to 
work is indicated by the fact that the average number of 
lunches served in three-quarters of an hour were two hun- 
dred and twenty-three. More than ^ve thousand men 
passed through and were cared for at the larger canteen 
stations daily. 

One cannot praise too highly the courage, resourceful- 
ness and endurance of these Eed Cross women, few of 
whom had ever had any previous experience in any form 
of work requiring physical effort. Many of them must 
have felt, quite as poignantly as any soldier, the pangs of 
homesickness whose insidious power to undermine morale 
is recognized by all armies. Comfort was not to be ex- 
pected. Certainly it was rarely obtained since the billets 
of the workers were generally within the War Zone where 
life was stripped of everything but the absolute essentials. 
The stations were frequently under the fire of German guns 
and aeroplanes, and influenza was always prevalent, fresh 
germs being constantly brought in by new troops. The 
women had their share of sickness and often kept on with 
their work when they were physically unfit even to wait on 
themselves. There were periods when the various groups 
were crippled by losses through illness and such situations 
were complicated by the difficulties of securing medical 
aid. 

As if their regular duties were not enough the Eed Cross 
women never failed to welcome an opportunity to be of 
service in other directions. The records are full of in- 
stances. At Chichey they carried food to three Polish 
regiments who in some unaccountable way seemed to be 
stranded there, and when the Spanish influenza broke out 
among these men the refreshments and delicacies they re- 
ceived from the canteen played a decided part, according to 
the opinion of the medical staff, in keeping the epidemic 
under control. When the great explosion occurred at the 
ammunition factory at Moulins and communications were 



CANTINES DES DEUX DRAPEAUX 41 

cut off owing to the destruction of part of the railway lines 
the canteen camion of St. Germain-des-Fosses rendered 
valuable service by making runs to Vichy for medical and 
other supplies. 

This canteen tended many French wounded on the trains 
and hundreds of refugees as they streamed from the battle 
zone. Similar work was done by all the L.O.C. canteens. 
During the worst period of the bombardment to which the 
town was subjected the Eed Cross personnel at Chalons- 
sur-Marne established a nightly automobile service that 
carried old people, children and delicate women to places 
of shelter. At Orry-la-Ville they distributed food and 
tobacco at a French field hospital, and also gave what other 
aid they could. At Epernay in particular the canteen at- 
tendants did splendid work when the evacuation hospitals 
were filled to overflowing during the month of May and the 
very small force of doctors and nurses could not begin to 
care for all the patients. 

The scenes at Epernay during those weeks of the French 
counter-attack will never be forgotten by those who wil> 
nessed them. The wounded came in such numbers that 
many could not be attended to for several days. Men lay 
about on stretchers on the station platform and in the hos- 
pital yard, often without coverings of any kind. Most of 
them were French, but a few were Englishmen whose tags 
the French doctors were unable to read. The American 
volunteer nurses from the canteen translated the inscrip- 
tions and picked out those requiring immediate attention, 
thus in all probability saving the lives of many of the poor 
fellows. They assisted also in the operating room and 
acted as interpreters between the French and English 
doctors who came later to help in the crisis. 

During the most critical period volunteers and regular 
personnel worked from eighteen to twenty-two hours a day, 
and the Red Cross representatives kept the canteen 
running at the same time, though fortunately the 
volume of its business had momentarily decreased as the 



42 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

troops were being ruslied to the front without a halt. For 
a week none of the Ked Cross workers slept more than two 
or three hours a night, and what little rest they could obtain 
was frequently broken by the enemy's bombardments. 

Every hour of life at these canteens was full of the stress 
and confusion of war, and the sympathies of the workers 
were always on the rack. It was difficult to meet cheer- 
fully these thousands of men hurrying to the call of the 
guns. It was still more painful to see the train-loads of 
their wounded return and to know that others had made 
their last brave journey. The human tide surged cease- 
lessly back and forth, leaving its grim sediment ; each ad- 
vancing wave of troops filled with the quiet courage and 
resolve that had taken the place of the confident elan of 
earlier days; each spent wave bearing itself uncomplain- 
ingly as it receded. The fortitude of the men helped to 
steady the nerves of the canteen workers, as their devoted 
efforts were 'of benefit to the morale of the men. 

More than one Red Cross woman found the patience of 
the poilu the most inspiring as well as the most pathetic fea- 
ture in her work. She had expected more dramatic, per- 
haps more theatrical traits, but none could have impressed 
her so much as this unforeseen one. It made her realize 
what the country had suffered, but how unconquerable it 
was ; it showed of what stuff the real France was made. 

In addition to finding the soldier more patient than 
her mental picture of him, the canteen worker saw that he 
was older also. The reason of this was not hard to grasp. 
The young men of France had been the vanguard, the ones 
who had gone to battle first, with the same fire and con- 
fidence that America's youthful army was to show later. 
The losses among such troops are always great when the 
enemy is skillful. It has been said of our men that they 
were splendid fighters rather than perfect soldiers, a state- 
ment that might have been applied with equal justice, per- 
haps, to the first young troops of France. Both had the 
dash and recklessness and the inexperience of youth. The 



CANTINES DES DEUX DRAPEAUX 43 

poilu that the canteen workers saw in 1917 was a tried sol- 
dier, the father of a family nsnally, a man already 
weighted with the responsibilities of life, who was past the 
age of heroic dreams. He felt none of the glamour of war. 
To him it was only a stupid, horrible thing that he must 
contend with philosophically and doggedly, till the last 
threatening spark expired under his heel. 

If there were any Red Cross women who entered the can- 
teen service with the spirit of the charity worker in its 
smaller sense, it is safe to say that close contact with 
France and her poilus brought about a revulsion of feeling. 
If they had not learned it before they learned then the 
whole truth about Germany and the war she had forced 
upon the world and henceforth, without blaming their own 
country for her eleventh-hour entry, they could think of 
every detail and every dollar of her participation, not as 
alms for the Allies, but as their due. 

At the outset of its cooperation with the Trench Red 
Cross knowledge of canteen work was purely theoretical 
and the experience gained proved of much value in the 
more extensive system inaugurated later for the United 
States Army. This was simply a coincidence. The ob- 
ject that the Red Cross had in view and which it success- 
fully accomplished was the giving of immediate aid to our 
ally. While it was impossible to keep accurate records in 
every case it is safe to say that the Franco- American can- 
teens served on an average the splendid total of one million 
men a month. With the rapid growth of the A.E.F. and 
the brigading of troops in various sectors of the front the 
canteen attendants were also able to serve many of their 
countrymen with food and drinks. This was specially the 
case at the canteens of the Metropolitan system, several of 
which came completely under our control, and eventually 
these stations served large numbers of American troops. 

The Franco- American and the A.E.F. canteens, though 
not always rigidly restricted in their service to any one na- 
tionality, had their separate and distinct purposes and were 



44: AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

rim accordingly. But in times of need any allied soldier 
was welcome and none were turned away without a meal 
because they lacked the centimes to pay for it. At our 
French canteens it was customary to instruct one of the 
workers to watch for those poilus who were low in funds, a 
state which their pride usually prevented their declaring. 
The watcher soon learned to read the signs — a prolonged 
scrutiny of the menu, a selection of dishes obviously based 
upon their cheapness, a way of fumbling in a purse, cer- 
tain facial expressions, etc. — and smoothed out the diffi- 
culty with tactful sympathy. Our own soldiers were 
grateful for what the Eed Cross did for them, but in a way 
they looked upon such attentions — and rightly so — as 
their due. The French poilu never ceased to act as if he 
thought it a beautiful and wonderful thing that American 
women and American money should have been sent to aid 
him. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE MUTILES 

THE peculiarly vicious and varied means of attempting 
the destruction of life used in the war were respon- 
sible for a huge number of permanently disabled men, the 
share of France alone being over six hundred thousand. 
The French government recognized almost immediately the 
problem it would have to face in caring for the maimed 
soldier and early in the war it outlined plans for technical 
aid and reeducation intended to accomplish three great fac- 
tors for good : The practical and moral value of this train- 
ing to the "mutile'^ himself; the gain to the community 
by lifting one of its members out of the pauper class, and 
the social and economical benefit to the country and to 
civilization. 

The experience of all neurasthenic hospitals and sana- 
toria has proved that work is the best cure for a diseased 
mind and the mind of the mutile was seldom in a normal 
condition. The director of one of the larg-est institutions 
for reeducation in France found that the morale of the 
men on arriving was at such a low ebb that it actually 
seemed necessary for him to create, as one of his first in- 
stallations, a cemetery for suicides. In a short while, 
however, the realization that they would be able to learn 
a trade that would furnish their own living and that 
of their families wrought an entire revulsion of feeling 
among these cripples and otherwise disabled men and lifted 
them from despondency to a cheerful and comparatively 
happy state. Once convinced that they were not to become 
helpless objects of charity they could appreciate the fact 

45 



46 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

that they could still eat and drink and have their friends ; 
thatj in a word, they were not dead. 

The first active work undertaken by the French govern- 
ment for the reeducation of the war cripples began in 
December, 1914, at the Ecole Jojfre at Lyon. This school 
with its annex at Tourvielle functioned throughout the war 
and is still one of the largest and best equipped reeduca- 
tional centers in the country. In the spring of 1915, a 
similar center was established by the Government at Saint- 
Maurice, near Paris — the Institut National des Invalides 
de la Guerre, formerly the National Home for Conva- 
lescents and the National Asylum for victims of industrial 
accidents. Among the early and influential groups which 
took up the question of reeducation was the Federation 
Nationale d^ Assistance aux Mutiles des Armees de Terre 
et de Merj the president of which was M. Maurice Barres, 
who through his book, ^^ Pour les Mutiles/' created a 
strong public sentiment for the reeducation of the crippled 
soldier. Many schools were developed along these same 
lines through the Ministries of Agriculture, of Commerce, 
and of the Interior, by public committees, departmental, 
communal and private effort. The larger schools were es- 
tablished near the important centers: Paris, Bordeaux, 
Lyon, Marseilles, Clermont-rerrand, etc., and smaller 
schools were scattered throughout eighty-two of the eighty- 
seven Departments of France. 

Soldiers discharged from the French military service 
fell within one of two classes : Eef ormes Number 1 and 
2. The term " reforme " is the equivalent to that of 
honorable discharge from the army, the difference between 
the classes being based on the origin of injuries, the first 
class including those whose wounds or maladies had been 
caused by events in active military service and the second, 
those whose wounds or maladies were not considered to 
have been received in active service, such as the sufferers 
from tuberculosis for instance. Reforme Number 1 had 
a legal right to a pension while Number 2 had no 



THE MUTILES 4Y 

claim. The French War Office established a ISTational 
Placement Service in Paris where any disabled soldier 
could apply for work. Here he was examined and his 
physical capabilities for any specially suggested employ- 
ment were studied. The nature of his disability, general 
health and aptitude for work were noted. Finally his 
subsequent movements were carefully observed until he was 
settled in the occupation chosen for him. 

Considering the vast amount of work to be done for the 
mutiles, the welcome which the cooperation and help of 
the American Red Cross received when it organized its 
Bureau for the Eeeducation of Mutiles in July, 1917, is 
easily understood. Prom the first it was the policy of the 
Bureau to lend its support through the existing French 
organizations whenever possible, in recogTiition of the fact 
that those in need of help could best be cared for through 
or by their own people. Close cooperation was maintained 
between the American Ped Cross and sixty-nine French 
groups concerned with disabled soldiers, as well as with the 
military and civil departments of the French government. 

While the disabled soldier of France had by no means 
been left uncared for there was little effort toward co- 
ordination and standardization of organized reeducational 
work, and the problem was further complicated by the 
steadily increasing numbers of the mutiles, the lack of 
artificial limbs and other appliances, and of schools. 

Investigation proved that seventy-five per cent, of the 
mutiles were farmers, many of whom needed only the 
proper substitute for a limb to be enabled to resume their 
regular work, or who could be retrained in some other 
branch of farm industry that would enable them to earn 
their living on and from the land. The number of agri- 
cultural professions that can be adapted for war cripples 
are many: overseer, game keeper, caretaker, gardener, 
driver of agricultural machines, vine-grower, nurseryman, 
seedsman, tree cultivator, grazier, cow-herder, dairy em- 
ployee, butter and cheese maker, steeper and stripper of 



48 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

flax and hemp, cider-maker, chicken raising, sheep, hog 
and rabbit breeding, fish and bee culture and silkworm 
culture. 

In view of the percentage of mutiles who had formerly 
been farmers, the number of agricultural pursuits open 
to them, and the fact that the Ministry of Agriculture had 
been especially interested in making it easier for the mutile 
to obtain small land holdings through loans made at special 
rates of interest, it seemed a wise procedure to the Red 
Cross to organize a farming center where the disabled 
soldier could obtain scientific training in farming indus- 
tries. Accordingly, in February, 1918, the Red Cross 
started such a center at Le Courbat near Tours where 
training in the following courses was given: live stock 
farming, dairy work, market gardening, horticulture, 
tractor operating and repairing. 

Six barracks were erected (three of which were pro- 
vided by the French government) and equipped as dormi- 
tories, class and recreation rooms, dining-hall and kitchen, 
bath, and infirmary of four beds. A trained American 
social worker was put in charge of the school and recrea- 
tion barracks and the little canteen where the men were 
sold chocolate, postcards, soap, shoe-laces, and a limited 
quantity of wine and tobacco, etc. The recreation room 
was made as attractive as possible with gay curtains, 
posters and flowers, and a phonograph and games were 
provided. The men proved very responsive and for the 
most part made good progress in their work though some 
suffered greatly from their mutilations and found it hard 
to conquer their mental depression. 

The Red Cross trained at this farm several Serbian 
mutiles as tractor conductors who on the completion of 
their course were sent to Serbia to prepare the land for 
the civilian population. After their graduation an appeal 
was received from their Governm_ent asking that more 
mutiles be accepted at the Red Cross farm and in con- 
sequence a total of twenty-seven disabled Serbians were 



THE MUTILES 49 

received and trained there. A few Frencli mutiles were 
also trained in this course', which, since it did not require 
the average period of from six to eight months' instruction, 
was the only one that was completed when the school was 
closed in ISTovember. All mutiles in the other sections 
were individually provided for by the Red Cross at the 
time of closing. Some took positions at once in prefer- 
ence to entering another school to complete their course 
under different conditions and others were transferred to 
schools of their own selection. One man was helped to 
establish a poultry business on a small farm which he was 
able to rent. 

When it became known that the Eed Cross intended 
to discontinue the farm in January, 1919 — in accordance 
with its general policy of winding up the work wherever 
possible — General Malleterre, President of the Associor 
tion Generale des Mutiles de la Guerre^ endeavored to take 
it over on behalf of the French, and to continue its train- 
ing courses without break. He obtained the cooperation 
of the National Office for Mutiles and Eeformes of the war, 
which body represented the French government, and also a 
contribution from the Government of Cuba, but unfor- 
tunately the proprietor would not come to an agreement 
concerning the sale of the property and the American Eed 
Cross dismantled the institution. All machinery was 
sold at the same price which had been paid for it while the 
live stock was disposed of to advantage. The dormitory 
equipment was given to the French government for a re- 
educational school to be opened at Lille and the three bar- 
racks owned by the Eed Cross were transferred to the 
United States Army. 

The situation in regard to artificial limbs when the 
Eed Cross came to France was a serious one. The re- 
sponsibility of manufacturing these articles had been as- 
sumed by the Government, which had its own factory 
and had also placed some contracts with private firms. 



60 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

Id addition the American Clearing House had, since 1915, 
contributed a certain number of limbs of American manu- 
facture, but the supply furnished from all these sources 
by no means met the demand. 

Thousands of soldiers who had suffered amputation 
of an arm or a leg were leaving the hospitals either with 
empty sleeves or on crutches, practically incapacitated as 
wage earners. It was not only a question of furnishing 
these men with proper artificial appliances, but the cost 
was an item of great importance to the French govern- 
ment. The advantages of the light willow American limbs 
over the heavy and cumbersome steel and leather French 
articles had already become apparent, but because of the 
radically different processes involved they were not being 
made in France to any great extent. There was need not 
only of more limbs but of better ones such as the Clearing 
House had contributed in comparatively small numbers, 
and when it was absorbed by the Eed Cross its work along 
these lines was continued by the latter organization upon 
a larger scale. 

At first the aims of the Eed Cross wera to assist 
only the mutiles of the Paris district, but this work did 
not seem sufficiently broad in its scope and eventually a 
change of plan was instituted. The disabled soldiers who 
came to the organization for aid often had artificial limbs 
which the French government had furnished them and 
with which they were dissatisfied. The demand for some- 
thing less awkward and more practical for all classes of 
soldiers who had suffered amputations seemed so impera- 
tive that the Red Cross resolved to give the matter special 
study. 

In cooperation with the French Service de Sante, which 
provided the buildings, a workshop was opened at Saint 
Maurice near Paris. A certain type of artificial limb was 
selected for manufacture while a corps of workers were 
gathered together which it was hoped would be able to 
evolve apparatus that would suit the immediate needs of 



THE MUTILES 51 

the situation more fully than anything yet on the market, 
the matter of cost having to be considered as well as prac- 
ticability. 

The corps included medical men as well as expert 
artisans. Their collection of apparatus for mutiles, 
gathered from all sources, became the best in France 
and there was no side of the problem to which they did 
not give careful attention. The United States Army, 
France and various governments and societies were glad 
to avail themselves of the opportunity to study their 
exhibit. The workshop had an annex in Paris in the form 
of a clinic where individual mutiles were examined and 
studies made of the different cases with a view to ascer- 
taining the desirability of certain types of amputations 
from the point of view of their relation to artificial limbs. 
Previous experience had proved that a limb was often 
fitted to a stump before the latter had finished shrinking 
— become ^' ripe " as it was called. All these important 
points were worked upon by the Ked Cross Corps and the 
results put at the disposal of the United States Army. 

The United States Army reached the decision that it 
was essential that artificial limbs, particularly legs, in- 
tended for our own men, should be provisional and an ar- 
rangement was made with the Eed Cross whereby it agreed 
to furnish these. Its investigations along this new line 
resulted in several useful pieces of apparatus, the best 
of which was the " Wilson type " of leg, which was in the 
form of a plaster cast supported by a light frame upon 
which the man walked. This was in May, 1918, and 
from that date on the Red Cross continued to supply 
the various army orthopedic hospitals with this type. It 
also made a number of arms, special shoes and braces, 
and an ingenious adjustable crutch that was designed to 
prevent crutch paralysis. 

The experiments and work of the Red Cross attracted 
the attention of the Greek government which in December, 
1918, asked the organization if it could be possible for it 



52 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

to give the Greek mutiles some assistance along these 
lines. The Eed Cross replied that it would be glad to do 
what it could and agreed to set up a limb-shop in Athens, 
furnishing the personnel and a certain amount of partially 
finished material. The shop, as it was finally equipped 
and stocked, was capable of turning out a good number of 
artificial legs per month. 

Undoubtedly severe facial disfigurement is the most 
tragic form of mutilation. For various reasons it cuts 
the mutile off from social and business life. The victim 
is excessively sensitive about his appearance. In the end 
it preys upon the mind and he hides himself from the 
sight of others as if there were a price upon his head. 
Frequently these poor fellows would not return to their 
homes after leaving the hospitals. One who came to the 
Eed Cross studio had refused to meet his family since 
he had received his wound, two and a half years before. 
He had a morbid dread of being seen by them in his ter- 
rible condition; of his whole face one might have said 
there was nothing left but one eye. Twenty operations 
had failed to make him look like a human being again. 

At the Red Cross studio a facial mask with a mustache 
was made for him that covered the fearful wounds. The 
soldier was almost overcome by his emotion when he 
realized that he was no longer repulsive to look at. His 
despondency left him and the desire to return immediately 
to his family became irresistible. 

The term " mask " does not do justice to the delicate, 
scientific and artistic appliances with which the Red Cross 
studio supplied many of the badly disfigured mutiles. A 
somewhat similar work which had been started in London 
for English soldiers furnished the model for the skilled 
Red Cross corps — some of them famous in the world of 
sculpture — whose atelier was established in the Latin 
Quarter. 

Trench warfare, in which a man's head was, generally 



THE MUTILES 53 

speaking, the most exposed part of his anatomy, had left 
a sad crop of several thousand facially wounded soldiers 
in France. Some of these were beyond surgical repair, 
their jaws and noses completely shot away or the bones 
of the face hopelessly shattered. The loss of an arm or 
a leg did not prevent the victim from mingling with the 
world. With a crutch, a cane, or a peg-leg he could get 
about and frequently he was able to work. He was a 
pathetic but not a hideous object, but the other, the man 
with the face so wrecked that he did not look like a man 
at all, knew that though people would pity him they would 
also prefer not to be with him. It was this knowledge 
that, as already has been said, drove the poor wretches 
into solitary retreats where they preferred to undergo slow 
starvation rather than exhibit their horrid disfigurements. 
It was to assist in the much needed rescue of these mutiles, 
for whom no special provision had been made, that the Red 
Cross decided to establish the little studio in the Latin 
Quarter. 

Some of the masks made there were intended to be used 
only temporarily, so that a certain number of mutiles 
whose features could be ultimately restored by surgery 
could in the meanwhile go about their normal life. They 
were much more comfortable and sanitary than the heavy 
bandages with which the faces of these men would other- 
wise have been swathed, as their construction permitted 
proper ventilation and they could easily be washed daily. 

In the making of a mask a cast was first taken of the 
mutile's face and on this a new face was built up in plas- 
tiline, the modeler using as a guide, photographs of the man 
before he was injured, and following hints from the 
mutile himself. When the new face was finished and ap- 
proved by the patient it was placed in a bath where it re- 
ceived a galvano plastic deposit of copper whose thick- 
ness did not exceed that of a visiting card. This metal 
mask was durable and rigid but very light. A coating of 
silver inside eliminated all possibility of irritation to the 



54 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

skin. Eyelashes were made of fine copper threads soldered 
on and a mustache was added if the patient wished. When 
the mutilation included the entire mouth the lips of the 
mask were slightly parted to enable the wearer to smoke a 
cigarette. Finally it was so skillfully painted that it 
merged perfectly with the living flesh. As the masks 
varied a good deal in shape and size the methods of at- 
taching them had to be worked out according to the re- 
quirements of the individual cases. 

With these masks the facially wounded soldier could re- 
take his place in the social and economical life of his com- 
munity. " I have found a position now/' said one. " I 
am no longer a pariah and can work unnoticed, thanks 
to my mask." Another who had lost the whole of his lower 
jaw had given up his position as bank clerk and freed 
his fiancee from her promise to marry him, saying that: 
" She has the right to feel afraid of such a man." Death 
seemed to be the only form of relief that this soldier 
could hope for when chance brought him to the attention 
of the Red Cross. A few months later his prospects had 
entirely changed and he wrote to the directress of the studio 
that his courage had returned, that he was going back to 
his work and expected to be married in the spring now that 
his fiancee could look at him again: '^ I can have a home 
of my own like other people." 

A later but very important feature of Red Cross work 
for the benefit of the mutiles was its reeducational cam- 
paign which began in March, 1918. It had become 
obvious to every one interested in the matter that those 
who most needed to be retrained in order to be able 
to earn a living were frequently not making any effort to 
secure the necessary assistance. This was due to several 
reasons. The great importance of such training was not 
always realized or the methods by which it could be se- 
cured. Moreover many of the most severely wounded took 
the attitude that, since they had become cripples while 



THE MUTILES 55 

fighting for their country, it was up to the country to take 
care of them for the future. The Government had 
fostered and spread this feeling hy announcing that cer- 
tain minor positions at its disposal would be granted 
to the cripples of war. In consequence there were a great 
many more mutiles awaiting these jobs than there were 
jobs. The majority of the disabled soldiers, however, were 
not concerning themselves about the matter of reeducation 
simply because they had other and more pleasant things 
to think about. After a long period of service in the 
army, sometimes extending over four years with a painful 
stay at a hospital in addition, these men were sick of army 
life and discipline and discomfort, and their one idea was 
to get back to their homes and families. They had had 
enough of work. Eest and coddling and the companion- 
ship of those they loved were the things they hungered 
for. 

This was of course a dangerous state of affairs. It was 
necessary to wake these men up to the necessity of earn- 
ing their daily bread. It would do them small good to 
shirk their responsibilities for the ease and comfort of their 
hearths if there was nothing coming in to keep the fires 
burning there. Left to themselves these men might easily 
become paupers and bring ruin upon their families. 

The French Service de Sante agreed with the Eed Cross 
as to the great usefulness of a campaign that would spread 
the propaganda of reeducation among all the scattered 
mutiles. The methods by which the Eed Cross proposed 
to diffuse this information were through lectures, moving 
pictures and placards. Cities and towns where hospitals 
for mutiles were located were the special objects of the 
campaigners and other points, if not visited directly, were 
reached by interesting and informing posters distributed 
through the Service de Sante. The personnel, equipment, 
and all expenses of these activities were provided by the 
Eed Cross. 

It was definitely shown that these campaigns accom- 



56 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

plished at least three good results. First^ — The number of 
mutiles entering reeducational schools increased. Second 
— Local schools were stimulated to raise their standards of 
work and to appeal for Government subsidies in order to 
extend their activities. Third — Departmental committees 
for mutiles became more interested in the welfare of the 
disabled soldiers in their regions. The interest in the 
lectures and films was keen and cumulative. The French, 
though not used to this method of spreading information 
among the public, seemed specially to appreciate its direct- 
ness. " If important questions could be piesented to us 
in the way you do it in America,'' said an intelligent ob- 
server, " we should make more progress here in France." 

In July, 1918, the Red Cross created a training course 
in practical electricity at the national professional institute 
for wounded soldiers at Saint-Maurice. The electrical in- 
dustry was selected by reason of the varied employments 
it offered which could be successfully performed by phys- 
ically handicapped men. For those who had been electri- 
cians before the war and had become crippled a sound 
theoretical training promised to put them in the way of be- 
coming foremen and supervisors. For others a practical 
knowledge of wiring, installation, and repairing would en- 
sure good positions in electrical workshops or in the many 
branches of industry which did not require heavy work. 
The JSTational Institute was specially chosen by the Red 
Cross as the best school in which to establish this 
new course for the reason that it was a permanently en- 
dowed institution which would continue to function after 
the war. 

Aid was given in other directions, to the National School 
for watchmaking at Cluses, the Pension for Russian 
mutiles at Paris, a ward and workshop added to the hos- 
pital for reformes at E^euilly, and contributions to many 
individuals. In August, 1918, the Red Cross cooperated 
with the Serbian government in establishing workshops for 
the retraining and education of the Serbian mutiles at the 



THE MUTILES 57 

Depot-Hospital at Francheville. The need of this par- 
ticular activity arose out of a situation so unusual and 
pathetic that it deserves a somewhat detailed description. 

When the Austrians attacked Serbia in August, 1914, 
they v^ere at first successful, but the Serbian army, small 
as it was, soon drove the invaders from the country. 
Austria saw she had a bigger piece of work on her hands 
than she had expected and made ready with care for a 
new and more formidable assault. This broke in E^ovem- 
ber. The Serbians, short of guns and ammunition, were 
forced back, fighting bravely. Belgrade fell. The out- 
look was black when France sent the supplies that Serbia 
lacked and put fresh power into her arm. Immediately 
she took the offensive and swept Austria out of Belgrade 
and back to her own borders, capturing sixty thousand 
prisoners. It was one of the greatest defeats administered 
to the Central Powers by any of the Allies during the war. 

Serbia's loss in killed and wounded was heavy, but not 
so great as the loss she was about to suffer from disease. 
In December typhus appeared, first in the army and then 
among the civil population which, undernourished and in- 
adequately clothed, offered favorable conditions for ita 
rapid spread. To add to the gravity of the situation 
there were only a few hundred doctors in the entire 
country. 

When these facts became known medical units were sent 
to her aid from America and the Allied powers, and the 
splendid work of these foreign doctors and nurses checked 
the disease in many quarters ; but nevertheless one hundred 
and thirty-five thousand people died of it during the six 
months that it raged. 

During the rest of the summer of 1915, Serbia was 
given a few months of comparative quiet, but a storm was 
brewing which was soon to bring destruction upon her. 
While the Allies were negotiating more or less hopefully 
with Bulgaria the Serbs saw plainly that as soon as her 



58 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

mobilization was complete her intention was actively to 
join the Central Powers in the field. If England and 
France had realized this in time much might have been 
accomplished, but Serbia alone foresaw Bulgaria's real 
plans and it was on her that the blow fell. 

In the fall of 1915 the mask was thrown off and Ger- 
many, Austria and Bulgaria united their forces for a 
combined attack upon Serbia. The enemy came down 
upon her from three sides at the same time. The only 
hope for Serbia was in prompt assistance from the Allies. 
In the meanwhile her army met the enemy and for sev- 
eral weeks made them pay dear for every inch of ground 
taken. Belgrade was again captured. The hope of aid 
from England and France vanished and the Serbian 
troops, seeing nothing but annihilation before them but 
refusing to surrender, began a general retreat. 

When this happened the whole nation became panic- 
stricken — with good reason — and imitated the action of 
its army. All Serbia was at once in motion, fleeing from 
the invaders by three principal routes. The first led 
through Macedonia to Greece or to the southern coast of 
Albania. The second twisted and doubled across a dif- 
ficult country, where many died of starvation and fatigue, 
ascended snow-clad mountains, and ended at last in Al- 
bania. The third, a shorter but more dangerous route, 
reached the same country by way of the Valley of the Drin 
Blanche, 

The order had been given that all boys from fourteen 
to eighteen must join the army which was to be reorganized 
at the end of the retreat. Convoys of these boys accord- 
ingly set out on foot for the meeting place, the sea coast of 
Albania, and with them went many younger brothers, 
children of ten or twelve years of age. There were 
thirty-five thousand boys in these convoys and only four- 
teen thousand crossed the frontier, ten thousand of whom 
succeeded in reaching the coast. What is remarkable is 
that so many withstood the hardships and privations of that 



THE MUTILES 59 

terrible winter journey. Ten thousand emaciated young 
specters came staggering down to the sea in scattered 
groups to wait for transportation to Corfu and the Island 
of Vido, now known as the " Island of the Dead," for when 
they at last crossed to Vido it was only to die there at the 
rate of one hundred a day. One thousand died on the 
short passage over. Others never lived to see the ships. 
Of all that heroic band of children only five thousand were 
alive in 1918. 

As soon as they were able to travel the French govern- 
ment offered to take charge of the care and education of all 
the refugee children, saying to Serbia: " Send us your 
youth." 

Serbian children came to France and Corsica and many 
young soldiers, some of whom were mutiles and all of whom 
were refugees, also came until about twenty thousand per- 
sons had migrated to France and its near by colonies, which 
treated them with a sympathetic understanding and warm 
kindliness that will not be forgotten. The French would 
have been delighted to do more for these guests than they 
were able to do, but the swiftly mounting cost of the war 
and the increasing difficulty of meeting its host of insa- 
tiable demands left too little time or money to be devoted 
to other needs. It was in such situations as this that the 
American Bed Cross could use its powers of assistance to 
the best advantage and it was therefore perfectly natural 
that it should offer to share in the support of the young 
Serbians, who had suffered more than any other people 
at the hands of the common enemy. 

The fact that the French schools were congested, that 
few of the Serbs had any knowledge of the language and 
that they could progress much more rapidly with instruc- 
tors of their own nationality, induced the Red Cross, urged 
thereto by the Serbian commanding officer at Franche- 
ville, to make them a gift of two barracks and a grant of 
thirty-five thousand francs to equip five workshops. To 
supplement this arrangement the Serbian government 



60 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

added a revolving fund of fifteen thousand francs to be 
devoted to purchasing material and paying salaries. The 
trades taught at the workshops were tailoring, shoe-making, 
harness-making, and carpentry. 

There had been a distressing lack at Francheville of 
warm clothing suitable for the wounded and convalescent 
men, and one of the first results of the Bed Cross aid was 
seen in the welcome activities of the tailor^s shop. This 
and the shoemaker's shop provided articles of which the 
Serbs themselves were actually in need ; but it was really 
the work itself that the inmates of the Depot sought. 

Homesickness, ill health, and somber memories of the 
past unrelieved by any hopes for the future had brought 
the morale of these Serbians very low. A Ked Cross rep- 
respentative describes the picture they made as they stood 
idly about on a bright June day whose sunshine failed to 
cheer them. '' Some were war cripples, many were obvi- 
ously tubercular, several were strangely dwarfed little 
creatures about four feet high. These last were prisoners 
of war from Austria, with legs amputated, some above, 
some below the knee (and the regularity of these dual 
amputations made one pause and think). They were 
raised on iron supports, and there was something inexpres- 
sibly sad about these wrecks of humanity, these victims of 
uncontrolled circumstances, who found themselves in a 
foreign land mutilated and deprived of all that makes life 
worth living. There were men listless and apathetic, or 
moody and sullen, or with a terrible stricken look in their 
faces which is hard to get out of one's mind. With homes 
and country in the hands of the enemy, they were exiles 
in a land where the language was not the least of many 
difficulties to contend with, and where it must be remem- 
bered, the people themselves had known invasion and were 
finding it more and more difficult to show hospitality to the 
stranger within their gates. The war seemed likely to go 
on for some time to come, and the hearts of the Serbs were 
heavy within them." 



THE MUTILES 61 

"Do you wonder that these men are melancholy?" 
asked the Director, pointing to the dark-clad, mournful 
figures. " Of their women and children they have no news, 
some for six years, for this war is but a continuation of 
our last so far as we are concerned. But we must remain 
a Nation, all these scattered units must somehow be 
reunited; it is a part of our creed and without it we are 
lost!" 

So on the hill-top at Francheville pathetic attempts 
were made to keep up the old spirit of independence and 
patriotism. Every Sunday the Serb cripples from the 
French schools at Lyon would foregather with their com- 
rades at the Depot to talk of their beloved little country 
across the sea, of their homes and children, and on Fete 
Days, the Serb laborers from the neighboring farms would 
gather in the chateau and sing the national songs and dance 
holos and drink to the future of a restored Serbia. 

From the moment they learned that the Red Cross would 
establish workshops at Francheville to be run by the Serbs 
themselves the morale began to improve. What it meant 
to them to feel that America was moved to help them is 
shown by the following letter from one of the mutiles of 
the Depot-Hospital. 



" Before leaving this school to return to our own coun- 
try, so well-beloved, so devastated by the enemy, and whose 
liberation we have awaited so long, I beg you to allow 
me to express to you in the names of all the Serb mutiles 
who have received instruction in this school, our gratitude 
and appreciation for the generosity and devotion which 
you have unfailingly shown us. 

" We had great admiration for the American Red Cross 
before entering the school, knowing well how the United 
States battle for right and humanity, and how they have 
come to the assistance of every one who has suffered from 
this abominable war, but we have found in this school that, 



62 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

thanks to your personal devotion, we have lived as in our 
own families. 

" I know that the noble people of the United States of 
America will continue to help our country, so devastated 
by this horrible war, until it is reestablished, and we shall 
always be happy to have followed the courses in this school 
under your direction, hoping that you will not forget us 
and hoping to show you that after we arrive in our own 
country we will follow the better methods shown to us. 

" In finishing our letter of appreciation, may I be per- 
mitted to cry, *" Vive the noble people of the United States ! 
— Vive the American Red Cross ! ' In the name of all 
my Serbian Comrades, 

" Yankovitc'h Kosta." 

A definite agreement was made between the American 
Eed Cross and the Serbian authorities that the workshops 
installed at Francheville should be later on transferred to 
Belgrade, there to form the nucleus of a Serb National 
School of Reeducation for War Cripples, and that the tech- 
nical director of the school, who was an ofiicial in the Min- 
istry of Public Works, should continue, at least for such 
time as might be considered necessary, to superintend 
the working of the school after its transference to Bel- 
grade. 



CHAPTEE YII 

REFUGEES 

I!N" the majority of all previous wars tlie invading armies 
have pierced the country of their opponents on a some- 
what narrow path of destruction and the civil population, 
while suffering a certain displacement, usually soon re- 
turned to take up their existence in what remained of their 
homes. The invasion of Belgium and the north of Erance 
was more like the rolling of a hroad tidal wave over the 
land. More than one tenth of the area of Erance, com- 
prising eight of her most densely populated and well-to-do 
Departments, was overrun and devastated or held by the 
forces of the Germans. 

This extensive area was rich in beet-sugar and dairy- 
farms, though perhaps not so renowned for the latter as 
]!Tormandy or Brittany, but it is here that the greatest coal 
and iron fields of Erance lay. The wealth of the Depart- 
ments was chiefly derived from their numerous mines, their 
foundries and their textile factories. Owing to the kind of 
labor there was probably a more diversified population 
here than anywhere else in the country, but even so it was, 
from an American point of view, a stable and homogeneous 
population. The inhabitant of the ISTorth of Erance is one 
of the sturdiest of European types. Descended from the 
old Elemish weavers he is honest, industrious and intelli- 
gent, with keen business powers. Consequently the major- 
ity of the people are well-to-do and abject poverty is very 
rare. The Gallic instincts of thrift and devotion to their 
" foyers " are highly developed in them. How tenaciously 
they clung to their homes is shown by the fact that the 

63 



64 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

early reports of enemy atrocities in Belgium failed to stir 
them. 

When the German armies^ had passed over Belgium and 
"were actually advancing into E^orthem France itself, some 
of the inhabitants fled, but many remained, partly because 
of their obstinate attachment to the soil and partly from 
a belief that in spite of terrible rumors the enemy would 
not be so cruel as wantonly to injure or kill defenseless 
civilians. They had not yet learned what war, as waged 
by the Germans, meant. The swiftly moving armies of 
the enemy came on and engulfed them. The able-bodied 
among those who had remained were held to labor for their 
captors and those who were not strong enough to be of any 
service died off or were ultimately returned tO' the unin- 
vaded part of France. 

The French refugees may be broadly classed in the fol- 
lowing three divisions according to the manner and time 
of their exodus, though the needs of all were about the 
same and the manner of meeting them closely parallel : the 
refugees pure and simple, the repatries, and the evacues. 

Of the first class, those who had the most to lose made 
an immediate rush upon the banks for their savings, and 
with what personal effects they could take with them, 
started south in trains, in automobiles, and in wagons. 
Most of them came from the centers of population and 
could pay to get quickly away to some point of safety 
where they were able to convert their holdings into cash 
and to reestablish themselves; but for the poorer people 
and those far from the lines of communication it was a 
different story. During those last days in Belgium, at 
Mons and Charleroi, at Maubeuge and Le Lateau, the thin 
lines of the French and British troops retreated rapidly 
before the weight of the German thrusts. For days and 
nights there was hardly an hour during which they could 
stop for rest. Remembering this, one can see how small 
the chances of getting away were for the mass of the in- 
habitants, dazed by the suddenness of the invasion and 



REFUGEES 66 

almost wholly without proper means of transportation. 

In August and September of 1914 the roads of North- 
ern France were filled with long lines of people^ one com- 
posed of groups of refugees fleeing from the Germans, 
the other, the soldiers of France, marching to meet the 
enemy. These were the first of the refugees that for four 
years steadily streamed back away from the War Zone. 
A precise count of their number has probably never been 
made, but during the two months mentioned about one and 
a quarter to one and a half million souls were forced to 
leave their homes. Added to the responsibility of launch- 
ing a great army into a defensive fight at the very door 
of its capital the French Government had to undertake 
the suddenly imposed and costly burden of caring for this 
multitude, and the work had to be done quickly and with 
decision. Huge appropriations had to be made for instant 
relief, for food, shelter, and transport for the refu- 
gees en route; for finding tenement buildings to relieve 
the inevitable congestion of Paris, where the daily arrivals 
sometimes totaled six thousand; for securing billeting 
places in the rural districts of France, and for the whole 
control of these bewildered, suffering masses. 

That it was well done is shown from the number of 
families that were saved from going under. It was not 
aU done by the Government, however. In those early days 
nearly every one in France was willing to share a corner 
of his home with one who had borne the heavy shock of 
war. Individuals contributed food and household belong- 
ings. All gave what they could to aid the refugees till 
some sort of labor could be provided for them. Societies 
for relief work began to spring up in all the large centers, 
with workers in the smaller places around them ; but these 
were not generally endowed with official powers or funo 
tions by the Government, and, as -a rule, lacked the ad- 
vantage of extensive coordination, so that in some cases the 
beneficiaries received too little help and in others more 
than their fair proportion. 



QQ AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

WLen the refugees were fitted into an appropriate en- 
vironment the situation was as favorable as possible, but 
often miners' families and factory workers, who neither 
knew nor cared anything about farming, found themselves 
placed in the country. As nearly all the mining regions 
were in the ^orth and were then in the enemy's hands, 
the displaced miners naturally looked for the only em- 
ployment they were fitted for, which was to be found in 
places like St. fitienne and Moulins. Here large furnaces 
and munition factories offered constantly ascending wages 
to men and women as well. But there were certain eco- 
nomical and social dangers in the situation. Evidently 
there had to be suflSciently large centers of munition-pro- 
duction to insure concentration and uniformity of output ; 
but the Government had to be careful also not to allow 
these centers to grow too large by reason of refugee labor 
for the social good of the communities. As long as rail- 
road travel was strictly regulated (and the French Gov- 
ernment during the war made every effort to do this) it 
was possible to keep down somewhat the rush of popula- 
tion to the cities. Sanitary and social standards are al- 
ways largely dependent upon the density of population and 
housing conditions of a community, and these conditions 
during the war were contingent upon the labor market. 
Labor and building materials all through the war were 
extremely scarce so that few old or unfinished tenements 
could either be repaired or completed to supply the nec- 
essary quarters for the great access of the refugees which 
the Government had undertaken to house at nominal or 
free rent. 

On the other side, many of the inhabitants of the agri- 
cultural sections were sent to the cities, where they could 
find no work to which they were accustomed; moreover, 
being used to life out-of-doors, the confinement and lack of 
exercise told heavily upon them. Such confusion, while 
it was unavoidable, led to restlessness and dissatisfaction 
as well as to positive hardships. 



REFUGEES 67 

In 1916 another class of refugees, tlie so-called re- 
patries, began to flow back into free France. These were 
people who had been living behind the German lines and 
who were finally sent away because their maintenance 
was becoming a burden to the invaders. Clinging to their 
homes with passionate devotion they had been caught by 
the German advance, and those who were able to work had 
been practically the slaves of their oppressors. After long 
months of toil and suffering those who had broken under 
•the strain, together with the useless little children, were 
herded into convoy trains and sent back to France by 
way of Switzerland. There was no pity in this act of 
the enemy, in whose eyes there apparently existed only two 
classes of human beings, those who were economically fit 
for his purposes and those who were unfit. 

" Make them work to the limit and pay for every mouth- 
ful they eat." That was German logic. Sex was imma- 
terial, or age — women over seventy were not exempted 
— so long as there was a sufiicient amount of physical 
strength. The captured inhabitants, were set at trench 
digging and all manner of menial and heavy labor. In 
time many of these began to give out and there had always 
been a residue of weak and aged. The Germans found 
these ^' incumbrances " getting on their nerves. They 
hated to see any one idle, particularly any prisoner, and 
eventually the order came from headquarters to get rid 
of these unfortunates whom they had robbed of everything, 
including health. 

" The good-for-nothings eat up the bread.'' " The brats 
drink up the milk we might have.'' Such were the Ger- 
man reasonings, and with their usual stern efficiency they 
acted upon the decision at once. 

The number of this class of refugees is more exactly 
known than those of the former class as they arrived by 
trains at a given point and could thus be counted. There 
were about three hundred and fifty thousand of them in all. 
They had begun to come back early in the year 1916, but in 



68 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the spring and summer of 1917 their number had been 
greatly augmented, so that when the American Eed Cross 
became organized in France about one thousand repatries 
were arriving every day at the little town of Evian, where 
the Mayor, always in evening clothes no matter what the 
hour, gave them an ofl&cial as well as affectionate welcome. 
Some of the travelers found relatives waiting to take 
care of them, or money to defray their expenses for a time. 
Those who had neither friends nor resources were sent 
in convoy trains to be billeted in Departments by the Min- 
istry of the Interior. 

In December, 1917, the Bureau of Civil Affairs of the 
American Eed Cross received from the Minister of the 
Interior an urgent request for aid in relieving the distress 
of the great and increasing number of refugees coming over 
the Swiss border. The following is an extract from his 
letter : . " . . . Will you permit me to ask you to look into 
the possibility of a new kind of collaboration, possibly more 
useful than the present? . . . The question of the refu- 
gees raises several problems of different orders. ... At 
the present moment I am especially concerned with the 
reception in the Departments of the trains which bring the 
repatriates from the Swiss frontier. 

" There arrive at Evian each week between seven thou- 
sand and seven thousand two hundred repatriates and, de- 
ducting those who are able to rejoin their families, 
resident in free France, or who are hospitalized, there 
are each week six trains of six hundred places each which 
convoy the repatriates to the Departments where a shelter 
is increasingly difficult to find and it is in this that your 
delegates could be useful in seconding the efforts of my 
prefects. I should be much obliged to you for letting me 
know whether you believe that you can enter into this 
plan, and also for giving me particulars as to the kind of 
aid which your delegates could furnish my prefects.'' 

In accepting the plan the Eed Cross replied as follows : 
" In general, I may say that it would be our idea to give 



REFUGEES 69 

assistance by supplying furniture, by completing unfur- 
nished buildings if that were found to be necessary, and if 
it can be done at moderate expense, by providing tools, 
seeds and other means of self-support where these would be 
useful or by any other means that would hasten the process 
of making the condition of the repatriates as nearly normal 
as possible. This, however, is only a very general state- 
ment of our understanding as to the part which we can 
wisely take, and our minds are entirely open to any 
counsel you may have to give us.'' 

The Eed Cross, which had already been helping to relieve 
the refugee situation in Paris and at other places, ex- 
panded its activities along these lines to meet the increas- 
ing needs, but as the above letter shows it laid down no 
positive lines of action, allowing its operating plans to 
remain more or less elastic. It may be said, however, 
that the letter gives a good idea of the sort of aid fur- 
nished in general by the Red Cross to all classes of 
refugees. 

Red Cross delegates were sent to Evian and to those 
Departments where the convoys were expected. Two 
trains a day were then bringing into the little town on 
Lake Geneva a throng of repatries, whose mental as well 
as physical condition was very bad indeed, for the shame- 
ful humiliations put upon them by the Germans had had 
as much effect as the bodily hardships which they had 
endured. One curious feature that shows the methodical 
habit of the German mind was the segregation of the 
travelers into car-load groups, the old in one division, 
the young in another, and the tubercular and insane, each 
in their separate compartments. Many were too weak or 
ill to walk and these were conveyed by the Red Cross 
ambulances to the Casino, the place chosen for the recep- 
tion and feeding of the repatries, or to the hospitals, one 
of which was established by the Red Cross, for an exami- 
nation by our physicians. 

These precautions were highly essential. To one sick 



70 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

child who had slipped through Evian before thorough medi- 
cal examination had been established two hundred cases of 
diphtheria and nine deaths in a distant part of France had 
been traced. Some of them had brought into France a 
certain form of typhoid — it made its first appearance at 
Lille — until that time unknown in the country and later 
it was observed at Evian. There was of course much 
tuberculosis and several kinds of skin disorders. The 
filthy, undernourished children were simply covered with 
the itch and alive with lice and fleas, those active carriers 
of disease. It is impossible to give an accurate picture 
of the wretched state of these poor people, hundreds of 
whom never reached Evian, but died en route and were 
buried at the first convenient stopping place. Other hun- 
dreds drew only a breath of liberty before passing away in 
the Evian hospitals. 

That in some towns, the Germans allowed American 
provisions the right of entry was due to the fact that they 
found it cheaper to let others feed these half-starved crea- 
tures. Biscuits that were supposed to contain the elements 
of a well-balanced ration were distributed in some of the 
towns as gifts from the United States and at ten o'clock 
every morning the children came eagerly to get them, and 
the results of this addition to their scanty diet were imme- 
diate and striking. The grateful people called this little 
biscuit " manna." 

If the parents suffered equally with the children from 
lack of food it was a matter of less importance in their 
eyes. As for us, they said, we are old, whether we are 
hungry or not is of little consequence. The whole story 
of the sacrifices they made to provide sufficient food and 
adequate garments for their infants during the cold, damp 
winters will never be told. 

Finally gifts of cloth began to come from America. 
Many of the people were almost naked by that time and 
their sufferings were great, especially among the old and 
feeble whose blood did not run warmly. The American 



REFUGEES 71 

cloth and the little caps and other articles of clothing were 
welcomed with thanksgivings. As one woman sat be- 
fore her window making a dress of this new cloth — 
the rags she had on she had worn for two years without 
change — she could see the Germans removing the con- 
tents of a factory across the way, throwing bolts of cloth 
out of the windows; cashmeres, flannels and serges; till 
camion after camion was piled high ; spoils of war which 
they had jealously guarded and were at length shipping 
away to the warehouses of Germany. And in describing 
her feelings at the time she has told of her thoughts : " For 
all that it has done for us, may God bless America.'' 
What American who loves his country will not be proud 
of having helped to evoke the gratitude expressed in such 
simple prayers. 

The refugee situation was, in its character, something 
like a fever. It had its steadily draining effect upon the 
country always, but at times it rose to a kind of crisis 
such as that just described at Evian and during the various 
extensive German or Allied offensives. In the latter, while 
new territory was not always ravished, villages that had 
early known the vicissitudes of war but had for varying 
periods thereafter been left in comparative peace, found 
themselves again within the actual storm of battle. Fre- 
quently some of the inhabitants had crept back to these 
villages to pick up the broken threads of their existence 
and all such became refugees once more, or if they were 
ordered to leave by the French military authorities, as 
was generally the case, they were classed as evacues. 
There was perhaps small difference between the one and 
the other, though the evacues, since they usually received 
warning beforehand, were able to retreat with most of their 
possessions. 

Early in its career in France, in July, 1917, to be exact, 
the Red Cross had organized a Eefugee Bureau which 
soon embarked upon a scheme of energetic relief, dispatch- 



72 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

ing delegates to those points where the refugees had con- 
gregated, erecting canteens to feed them en route — for 
the streams of refugees were still flowing — and estah- 
lishing dispensaries, clinics and vestiaires, or storehouses 
where they could obtain clothing. All these numerous 
activities were carried out with the cooperation of French 
relief societies, and in many cases Eed Cross aid took 
the sole form of money contributions to those societies 
which had done, and were continuing to do, magniflcent 
work. But one must not overlook the fact that the cost 
of all this relief work had been mounting to huge propor- 
tions. Thel highest figures ever reached by Eed Cross 
refugee appropriations for one month were one million 
four hundred thousand dollars, whereas in 191 Y, the 
French Government was spending a mouthy average of 
fourteen million dollars for the same work and at a time 
when her military needs were drawing ravenously upon 
the resources of the country. If the aid given by the Eed 
Cross had been multiplied by twenty there would still 
have been much left to do. 

Paris, the Mecca for all things French and for all classes 
of society, was naturally the point toward which the major- 
ity of the refugees turned early in the war. They expected 
to find there the aid and the security they needed, but 
after a time the care of these thousands became a grave 
municipal problem, owing to the housing and food situa- 
tion and the fact that work could not be found for all of 
them. The Government had already granted a daily pen- 
sion of one and a half francs for each adult and one franc 
for each child under sixteen, and in some cases, in the 
centers of population, an additional allowance of ^yq 
francs a month was given for rent to the head of the 
family ; but this did not go far toward securing habitable 
quarters in Paris, where the cost of living was rapidly 
increasing. 

When the Eed Cross began to operate it found that the 
most distressful conditions were existing among the ref- 



REFUGEES 73 

ugees in the city. iN'aturallj they had sought the cheapest 
rooms obtainable and had packed themselves in as closely 
as possible, nsuall}^ eating, sleeping and living in one 
room, a state of affairs not conducive to good morals or 
good health. As was inevitable sickness began to appear 
among them. To add to their troubles rents rose by 
leaps and bounds. By a Government Act no family, one 
of whose members was mobilized, could be ejected for non- 
payment of rent if they had been occupants before the 
war. This was very well so far as it went, but it did not 
protect the unfortunate refugees; indeed it tended to 
increase their distress, for in some instances the landlords 
tried to get from them what could not be demanded of the 
before-the-war renters, who were protected by the afore- 
said act. 

The Red Cross canvassed Paris for houses that could 
be made into refugee tenements. Out of one hundred and 
fifty possible places it was decided that it would be practi- 
cable to finish or repair only sixty, which might house 
about nine thousand persons at the expense of forty dol- 
lars per family. The Red Cross furnished the necessary 
financial assistance and four French societies undertook 
to superintend the completion and management of the 
buildings. Here was one of the many situations not 
reached by official aid, in spite of large Government ap- 
propriations, where the comparatively small amount ex- 
pended by the Red Cross made all the difference between 
misery and a livable existence to several thousand people. 

The organization was in a delicate position. It was 
trying to operate in a foreign country where it had no 
official standing except by courtesy, and it was difficult 
for it to use what it characteristically considered as effec- 
tive methods for the carrying out of plans without seeming 
disagreeably officious and self-sufficient. It was laid down 
as a rule, therefore, that in all refugee relief work — the 
rule applied to all its forms of French war relief work — 
the Red Cross must not give the least grounds for the 



74 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

criticism that it was assuining a certain prerogative in help- 
ing to lift the burden that naturally belonged to the French 
authorities. Proof that it was generally successful is to 
be found in most of its records. As a well-known French 
woman, herself a captive in Northern France, remarked: 
" One does not need to blush in accepting the aid of the 
American Red Cross." 

Information and cooperation was always sought from the 
French societies, the Eed Cross seldom proceeding on its 
own initiative save in cases of great immediate necessity. 
Mistakes were sometimes made, but they usually arose from 
over-generosity. The organization had come to France 
not to keep shop or to dicker, but to show in the most prac- 
tical ways possible the warmth of American sympathy and 
to prove that our promise to make the cause of the Allies 
our own had material power behind it. 

At an early date the Bureau of Refugees had sent out 
delegates to Amiens, St. l^tienne, Dijon, Chartres, Cannes, 
and Dinan, well distributed and representative centers 
for such work throughout France. Refugees in these 
towns were helped and arrangements made to receive oth- 
ers, who were coming into Paris at a rate which made a 
proper reception very difficult. In the summer of 1918 
the rush of fugitives from the districts of the Aisne and 
the Marne became so great that an appeal for help was 
sent to the Red Cross by the Government. 

The majority came through the railway station known 
as the Gave du Nord. The French had established a tem- 
porary hospital there and two canteens, one in the base- 
ment and the other in the court where the crippled and 
the sick, who could not go downstairs, were fed. The 
Bureau sent a corps of workers to assist in receiving and 
caring for the flood of travelers who, as usual, were in a 
sorry condition. Additional hospitals were installed, 
medical attention given, an ambulance service maintained, 
supplies furnished the canteens, and dispensaries started. 
Night after night — the convoys usually arrived at the 



REFUGEES TS 

end of the day -— the work went on, often from sunset to 
dawn and frequently complicated by the raids of the 
German aeroplanes upon the city. It was rather disheart- 
ening for these poor people, dazed and shaken as they were 
by the horrors of the War Zone they had just left, to be 
greeted by the wailing sirens of Paris, the crackle of shrap- 
nel, and the heavy, rending explosions of the Boche bombs. 

The villages from which these refugees of the summer 
of 1918 had come were those that had been taken by the 
Germans early in the war and from which they had been 
driven in March, 1917. In their retreat they had method- 
ically and effectively carried out a sullen work of destruc- 
tion, burning and blowing up houses and barns and 
bridges, hewing down orchards and shade trees, and carry- 
ing off or wrecking all vehicles and agricultural machines 
and implements. Some of their ruinous activity was 
probably justified by military necessity, but most of it 
was due to plain German spite, such as the poisoning of 
wells and the malicious destruction of personal property. 
Whatever their motive they did their work well, destroy- 
ing two hundred and sixty-four villages and deporting 
all the able-bodied inhabitants. The German newspaper, 
the LoJcal Anzeiger, confined itself to the ungarnished 
truth when it declared with pride that : ^' The land given 
up forms to-day a veritable desert which one might call 
the Kingdom of the Dead." 

In the following year those inhabitants who had es- 
caped the German drag-net gradually returned to that part 
of the War Zone from which the Germans had been driven, 
and painfully, for few of them were young or vigorous, 
began to patch up some kind of a shelter and try to scratch 
a living from the neglected soil. Lacking nearly all the 
essentials even of peasant life, their situation naturally 
attracted the immediate attention of the Red Cross which 
took steps to join in the work for their relief, establish- 
ing various headquarters in these devastated districts with 
warehouses at Arras, Ham, Noyon, and Soissons, within 



76 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

range of the German cannon. A corps of field workers was 
sent into the valley of the Somme to aid in rendering habi- 
table the houses and stables of the returning peasants and 
supplies of all kinds, food, clothing, furniture, seeds, farm 
implements, were sent to the warehouses where they were 
readily available. Other organizations, French and Amer- 
ican, were carrying forward the same work. Its repair 
work upon the wrecked buildings was done loj the Red 
Cross independently, but in all other forms of relief it 
extended to this section at this time, it cooperated with 
various organizations, such as the American Fund for 
French Wounded and the Society of Friends at Golan- 
court. Ham, and Gruny, and the Smith College Eelief 
Unit at Grecourt, all of which acted as distributing agen- 
cies for the Eed Cross gifts. 

In passing it should be understood that many college 
units and other groups of relief workers cooperated in Red 
Cross activities in behalf of the civil population of France. 
The method of cooperation varied, but in all cases the col- 
lege groups were self-supporting in so far as the mainte- 
nance of their personnel, their equipment and transporta- 
tion were concerned, the Red Cross directing the work and 
furnishing the supplies. 

The first distribution of Red Cross supplies in the De- 
partment of the Pas-de-Calais, held at the city of Arras, 
is thus described in a letter from a local Red Cross dele- 
gate : " The first general distribution of American Red 
C^ross gifts was effected here on Thursday. The mayors 
of thirty communes were invited to attend or send a rep- 
resentative to Arras. They arrived from three corners 
of the compass (the zone between them and the firing 
line being unpopular as an abiding place) with every im- 
aginable vehicle that could be pushed, pulled or propelled 
by man, mule or motor. At the Red Cross ' bons ' were 
distributed bearing a list of the relief material destined 
for each village. From the Church of the Advent, a con- 
gregation of four hundred and twenty-seven wheelbarrows 



REFUGEES 77 

made a very respectable exit. From the wareliousesi of 
the Service de Reconstitution over twelve thousand francs^ 
worth of farming tools went forth to dig, rake, hoe, chop, 
sprinkle, sow, or harvest according to their various capa- 
bilities, and finally from the prefecture two hundred and 
twelve sacks of granulated sugar were cautiously started 
on their way toward several thousand palates, palates that 
for weeks had been very meagerly sweetened." 

The Smith College Unit, whose headquarters were at 
Grecourt, was busy with relief and reconstruction work in 
a group of ruined villages in the vicinity of Nesle, to which 
stragglers had returned, drawn by the irresistible homing 
instinct of the French countryman. These people were 
in a most forlorn condition, depressed by the fate of rela- 
tives deported by the Germans, clothed in rags, living in 
improvised hovels, and often in actual need of food. The 
college unit fed and clothed them and supplied them with 
blanl?:ets and established sewing-rooms and workshops. 
But as the majority naturally turned to the land for their 
living the unit bought and distributed seeds and in every 
way possible entered into the plans for the planting and 
cultivation of the soil. 

The unit had its own farm yard, stocked with rabbits 
and poultry (hens were very scarce) and a herd of eight 
cows whose milk was sold at the small price of six cents 
a quart. 

Hand in hand with these efforts to bring life into these 
dead villages again was an equally determined endeavor 
to make their wheat fields produce, for France had 
long been short of grain. The French peasant sticks to 
old customs tenaciously and community cooperation strikes 
him as a dangerous surrender of his beloved individualism, 
but the help and sympathy given him by the relief organ- 
izations made him more open than usual to suggestions, 
and under their guidance he consented to join his neigh- 
bors in forming agricultural cooperative societies. IvTearly 
one hundred of these societies had been created by March, 



78 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

1918. They were tilling their fields with American trac- 
tor plows, rented them by the French Government, and 
sowing in: them the seeds given by the American Eed 
Cross. Elocks of sheep, furnished by the same organiza- 
tion, grazed in the meadows. 

Among the ruins along the Somme valley the country 
was beginning to wear a peaceful and productive air. 
The French poilus, en repos in the district, had done their 
share in bringing the land to fresh fruitfulness, and the 
soldiers of the British Army were cultivating twenty 
thousand hectares of grain and potatoes. A year had 
passed since the Germans had been forced back to the 
Hindenburg Line. Then came the gathering rumble of 
the new drive, the second great German offensive, and the 
order was received to evacuate immediately. 



CHAPTEE VIII 

T'HE NEW OFFENSIVE 

ALL that had been laboriously accomplished in the way 
of rendering the villages habitable and the land pro- 
ductive was lost and the several hundred thousand people 
who had been toiling there saw their growing hopes de- 
molished in an instant. For the second time they were 
obliged to flee from their homes, and so impetuous was 
the German attack that before the inhabitants could get 
away the shells were falling among them. One old woman 
was digging in her garden when the Eed Cross workers 
came to carry her away. She was not able to take to the 
road on her own feet for, according to her reckoning, ghe 
was one hundred and seven years of age ; but her courage 
was proof against the crashing of high explosives. She 
had experienced war before. " I saw the great Napoleon's 
men march through my village,'^ she said. She was the 
oldest of the evacues whom the camions of the Red Cross 
carried out of danger that day, as a certain pair of twins 
were the youngest. They had just come into the world 
and the first earthly sounds that greeted their infant ears 
were the reverberations of the contending cannon. 

The Smith College Unit packed a few things into trav- 
eling bags and with its motor cars assisted the people of 
the town to escape, not forgetting to drive out the herd 
of cows, for it knew the milk would be a necessity for the 
babies and old people. When the evacuation had been ac- 
complished it reported with its motor cars to the Eed 
Cross delegate for the Somme, placing itself under his 
orders. Pushed along from town to town with the bands 
of homeless fugitives, the unit finally found itself at 
Beauvais. 

79 



80 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

There tlie refugees were lying on the floor of the station, 
in freight trains and sheds and in wagons, sleeping any- 
where they could find a spot on which to lie. Together 
with some of the Friends, also fugitives from their dis- 
tricts, the unit began to feed the refugees. The Society 
of Friends took charge of the revictualing of the trains 
of refugees that constantly streamed through the town, 
supplying them with biscuits, meat, chocolates, condensed 
milk, etc., which they were able to distribute from the 
Eed Cross warehouses. The Smith Unit cared for the 
people who remained in Beauvais, working unceasingly 
night and day until the trains became less and less fre- 
quent and all the refugees had left Beauvais for points 
further south. 

The Eed Cross used all the means of transportation at 
its disposal to help carry the people across the Somme 
bridges, built by American engineers, to points of safety 
on the further side. All along the sector the work of 
evacuation was furiously proceeding. Soissons was 
emptied on the twenty-eighth. Two thousand people 
from Ham were taken by the Eed Cross to E"esle and, when 
that town became untenable, they were hurried on to Eoye, 
where the staff of the Eed Cross Children's Hospital treated 
many wounded soldiers that day. On the following morn- 
ing the word to move on was again given and all proceeded 
to Amiens. On the third day of the battle the relief unit 
from Arras joined the hospital staff at Amiens. At Mont- 
didier Eed Cross workers from Ham, E"esle, and Grecourt 
were busy. I^oyon was being bombarded heavily and its 
citizens were caught in the shell-fire. Those who were able 
fled like stampeded cattle. The Eed Cross automobiles 
saved many of the old, the weak and the young. Before 
the fourth day of the battle dawned Montdidier and Las- 
signy had to be evacuated and on the fifth day fifty 
thousand people left the city of Amiens, whose walls were 
shaking under the thunder of the approaching guns. 

In these and the many wild days that followed the work- 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 81 

ers and the camions of the Red Cross did invaluable 
service. The offensive had broken sooner than was ex- 
pected and it v^as swift and terrible beyond description. 
The Red Cross lost some of the stores in its warehouses 
but the great duty of all the relief societies in the field 
was to save the panic-stricken people. The Germans were 
always close on their heels. Shells and bombs were shriek- 
ing overhead and exploding among the towns in which the 
Red Cross units worked, assisting those who needed medi- 
cal or other aid; hurrying them off in motor cars and re- 
turning for more; sometimes carrying loads of wounded, 
both civilians and soldiers. British and French troops 
were flowing back and mingling with the stream of ref- 
ugees, saying : " The Germans are too many for us, we 
have got to retreat." The Red Cross canteens served more 
than twenty thousand soldiers a day in addition to civil- 
ians. At Beauvais, to which town the Smith College 
Unit had been moved, a refugee hospital was opened with 
Red Cross doctors and nurses, and before it was filled, the 
enemy planes found it out and tried to destroy it with 
bombs. One mother could not be moved to the cellar vdth 
the other patients and with her newly-born child and nurse 
stayed in the dark room during the raid. When the planes 
seemed to be hovering directly overhead the nurse raised 
the baby from its cot and held it in her arms and a moment 
later, with a whistling roar, a bomb fell close by. The 
force of the explosion shattered the windows and dashed 
large fragments of glass upon the baby's bed. It was a 
fearful period for the mothers. The air was full of death 
that strnck everywhere, at all hours of the day and night. 

During the great offensive, which continued for several 
v^eeks, the Red Cross worked day and night. Then fol- 
lowed a lull in the fighting due to the exhaustion of the 
troops on both sides; but the Allies foresaw and rapidly 
prepared for a resumption of the German drive. 

The interim of quiet was not of long duration. On 
the 2Sth of May the offensive began again. The Prefet of 



82 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the Department of the Marne called for Eed Cross aid in 
evacuating the inhabitants of the town of Fismes, near 
Eheims, and the unit at Chalons immediately responded 
with all the motor oars at its disposal. At five o'clock the 
next morning it was within sight of Fismes, only to fi«nd 
it in the hands of the Germans before whom the Fifth 
British Army was fleeing. The Red Cross cars picked up 
scores of people along the road and carried them to Eper- 
nay, which was for the moment safe. The unit then 
evacuated Geux and other small towns near by. Back and 
forth the cars plied, but rapidity of progress was impossi- 
ble for the region abounded in steep hills and the narrow 
roads were packed with artillery and troops on the retreat. 
Blinding clouds of dust added to the confusion. Wounded 
soldiers were staggering from the ranks and falling on the 
roadside, and the Red Cross transported many of these to 
posts of succor in the rear. 

The situation grew even more serious the next day. 
The Red Cross unit sent to Paris for more cars and that 
night five trucks with sixteen drivers left the capital and 
raced to Chateau-Thierry. Practically all the personnel of 
the Red Cross in that section had concentrated there and 
were evacuating the large town of Compiegne in the dark- 
ness. Two of the newly arrived trucks stayed to assist 
in this work while three went on to Epernay, where the 
French had a military hospital into which thousands of 
wounded were pouring, with only one doctor and one 
nurse to look after them. French and British soldiers 
were lying about the grounds and on the floors of the hos- 
pital wards unattended, many of them dying. No one 
seemed to be able to handle the situation and panic was in 
the air. 

The Red Cross took upon itself the practical charge of 
the hospital. It withdrew its workers from a canteen it 
had established in the town and turned them into nurses 
who, in this crisis, administered morphine, bandaged 
wounds, and alleviated in every way in their power the 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 83 

sufferings of tlie soldiers. Operations were performed by 
candle light, or the ray of a flash-light. The Red Cross 
trucks handled all of the hospital transportation. Word 
was sent to General Headquarters at Chaumont asking 
for aid, and to the Australian medical unit which was not 
far away. On the first of June, two medical teams from 
Chaumont arrived and the Australians sent a train the next 
day and started to evacuate the patients, for Epernay 
was being raided every night and the hospital was the 
particular mark for the German airmen who sprayed it 
so viciously with "mitrailleuse bullets that many of the 
wounded died from shock. 

In a few days the refugees from the district of Fismes 
began to reach Sens, to which, as it had been selected by the 
Controleur des Refugies as a reassembling center, a Red 
Cross unit was dispatched. Most of them had been turned 
back from Paris or Troyes, whither they had hastened 
in the first flush of their panic, and they arrived by train, 
on foot, or in vehicles of every description. They came in 
such numbers that the town could not furnish them with 
sufiicient food. By means of Red Cross supplies, which 
were rushed to the scene in large quantities, the women 
of the relief society called the French Comite des Refugies^ 
were able to serve twenty-three hundred meals a day at a 
portable kitchen stationed at the outskirts of the town. 
Here were gathered the fugitives who had toiled over 
the miles of road with their horses, cows and sheep, all 
parked in a restless, dusty herd. At the canteen of the 
Fourneau Economique other thousands were fed. Six 
large rest-houses had been hurriedly prepared to receive 
them, while arrangements were being made to divide them 
into the convoys, eight hundred to a thousand strong, which 
were being dispatched as fast as they were ready to those 
cities of the center and south of France indicated by the 
Ministry of the Interior. 

One of these rest-houses was the Archbishop's palace, 
where every night from seven to eight hundred people were 



84 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

lodged. The American Eed Cross turned one of the large 
rooms into a temporary dispensary, supplying the blankets, 
sheets, beds, and medical stores, and four French Red Cross 
nurses cared for the large numbers that, first and last, 
were brought there. Most of them, particularly the chil- 
dren, were suffering from forms of shock and hysteria in- 
duced by the terrible experiences to which they had been 
subjected. Many mothers of babies only a few days old 
were given tender care in that old palace, and scores of 
aged and feeble men and women gained there new 
strength to support them on their way. Theirs was the 
hardest lot of all. Some of them had lost their sons in 
the war and had no relative to turn to and now th'ey found 
themselves torn from homes and dependent upon charity 
for every necessity of life. 

" We have nothing and we are nothing," said one of 
them. " The only proper thing for us to do is to die 
quickly, but even our dying will inconvenience the 
strangers among whom we must pass our last days." 

War had not only taken from these people their chil- 
dren; it had stripped them of their dignity and self-re- 
spect in depriving them of a place to hide their sorrow from 
the public gaze. With them associations were more 
numerous and powerful than with the younger refugees. 
The constantly changing conditions of Ainerican life have 
not, as a rule, allowed time to form such strong attach- 
ments to the soil. If success in business warrants it the 
American usually moves to what he considers, for one rea- 
son or another, a more desirable location. He seldom 
occupies the house in which his father or his mother was 
born and would be filled with dismay if he were told he 
had to, but the great mass of the French people live in 
homes that have seen the birth and death of many genera- 
tions of the family. They love their not over-clean or 
over-comfortable villages with a devotion which we can only 
vaguely guess at. Every square inch of ground they walk 
on is hallowed with associations and traditions. 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 85 

On the third of June the Germans began to shell Eper- 
nay. They were then only about twelve kilometers away 
and it was expected that the town would fall. Sixteen 
girls from the Red Cross canteen were working in the 
hospital, and they stayed there. Epernay was not the only 
place where the Eed Cross was showing its courage and de- 
votion in those terrible days. There were Red Cross emer- 
gency hospitals at Montmirail and Cezannes and other 
towns, in charge of personnel from the Department of the 
Meuse, and the women of the American Fund for French 
Wounded were doing their share. One of them drove a 
car for a Red Cross unit, working over roads that were 
always under fire, after the regular chauffeur had been 
wounded by a shell. 

About three weeks later there came a rumor that the 
United States troops had been thrown into Chateau- 
Thierry. Then followed the definite information of a gain 
of twenty-five kilometers by our men. The United States 
Army had struck its first blow under its own command. 

At the time the Red Cross workers could judge of the 
military significance of the results only by the changes in 
their own situation. ^^ The thing," as one worker at 
Epernay expressed it, ^^ seemed to halt right there.'' The 
Germans stopped shelling the town. The great offensive 
died down. To be on the safe side the Red Cross evacu- 
ated the hospital at Epernay, moving the patients to a for- 
mation in the rear, where it took charge of them for sev- 
eral weeks. 

One of the most interesting outstanding features of the 
work of the R,ed Cross Transportation Department, on the 
civilian side, was its efforts for the refugees of these spring 
a-nd summer drives of 1918. There is absolutely no means 
of determining how many of these people were served by 
the American Red Cross transport system. The drivers 
received their orders to help and just " jumped in," not 
stopping to count heads. One car may have made a short 



86 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

haul to a place of safety a dozen or twenty times a day, or a 
longer haul fewer times. The drivers worked night and 
day, taking poeket-luncheons and stealing cat-naps on their 
seats between rides. 

The Eed Cross transportation director said of this 
period : '' There have been many serious refugee dis- 
asters to be met, but they all fade into insignificance com- 
pared with the situation confronting us in the months of 
March, April, May and June, 1918. Towards the middle 
of March, the German High-Command, being convinced 
probably of the fact that American troops were arriving in 
such numbers as to rapidly become a serious menace to 
them, decided to make a drive on Paris, with the hope 
that, with the capture of the French capital, a condition 
of chaos could be created which would serve as a mortal 
blov/ to the Allied cause on the Western front. During the 
first few days of the offensive over the scarred battlefields 
of the Somme and Aisne, the enemy took in rapid succes- 
sion the towns of E'oyon, Roye, Ham, [N'esle, and Eibe- 
court and seriously threatened the important railway 
center at Amiens. All this territory had formerly been 
captured by the enemy in the previous year, and during 
the closing months of 1917 and early 1918 this territory 
had been recaptured and active preparations made to re- 
construct and rehabilitate the civilian population. In one 
fell swoop this gradual pushing back of the enemy was 
wiped out, and the thousands of civilians who had drifted 
back to their homes were given no time whatever to get 
away from the advancing enemy." Happily this drive 
was finally held in check at Montdidier, near which several 
of our American divisions at Cantigny did such valiant 
work in April against the enemy. 

^ow the German High-Command looked around again 
for another outlet, with Paris again as the goal. This 
time it was southward from a line drawn between Rheims 
on the east to Soissons on the west, a stretch of about sixty 
miles, comprising all the length of the greatly contested 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 87 

Chemin des Dames. In the latter part of May they surged 
southward for forty miles between these two points as far 
as Chateau-Thierry on the Mame, old territory from which 
the French army had driven them in September, 1914. 
Here fortunately they were again stopped, American 
ti*oops playing well their part in this action. Had the 
Germans been able to push a very little further westward 
into the fastnesses of the large forest regions around Villa 
Cotterets, south of Soissons and around Compiegne, things 
would indeed have looked very bad for the Allies ; for with 
a number of huge gun-emplacements set up there, Paris 
could have been laid under a continuous long-distance shell- 
fire sufficient to have produced such a panic in the capital 
as to have crippled seriously the morale of the whole 
French army. 

It is utterly impossible to conceive the picture of misery 
presented by the evacuated refugees, especially when given 
notice that they must get out within a very few hours. In 
some cases they were given only half an hour in which to 
leave. The town of I^oyon, of twenty-five thousand in- 
habitants, Ham, ISTesle, Eibecourt, F'ere-en-Tardenois, 
Chateau-Thierry, and all the villages round about, had 
suddenly to arise en masse and decamp. The problem be- 
fore the American Eed Cross Transportation Department 
at this time was staggering. In such an emergency every 
possible spare car of whatever description and every spare 
driver were rushed to the front, with passes and orders to 
pick up those who were most in need of such service, to 
get them to some railhead or point from which they might 
be advanced further into the safety zone. The story of 
one of the drivers comes in here well in point. 

'^ In May, 1918, in connection with Chateau-Thierry I 
had refugee w^ork to do and remember perfectly well the 
first order given me in this connection. It was to go out 
and bring in a smashed car which I succeeded in doing, 
I had a pass ready as a volunteer : had no trunk or clothes 
there, except what were on my back. I worked in over- 



88 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

alls, and pieced them out by what I could find from time 
to time. It was a convoy of three trucks, under command 

of Captain . It was dark at Chateau-Thierry: the 

Boches were there. The French and English were retreat- 
ing and we were giving out ^ eats ' (chocolate and saus- 
ages) to them as they went through, falling back to Mont- 
mirail, some twenty kilometers southeast of there. 

" We were given orders to get out of Montmirail at 4 
A. M. I slept in my truck a little while before starting. 
I pulled it up at Compiegne. They were nearly all old 
people that I saw. It was pitiful indeed. There was one 
old woman of eighty, and a daughter of sixty, also an old 
grandmother of past ninety. Another case was of an old 
man and his wife, who was older. He was very much op- 
posed to leaving, saying that he would find a way of get- 
ting away in time. The wife cried like a baby when she 
found that they would have to be evacuated. I had 
actually to lift her by force into the camionette and compel 
them to come along. They had buried nearly all their 
wine, and gave to the chauffeur what they themselves 
could not carry to give to French poilus on the road. At 
More Eglise, near Compiegne and below Noyon, I was 
trying to find some one to be evacuated. The French 
soldiers were nervous: they told me to get away, as the 
Boches were coming. But I got all my people though 
big guns were firing and observation-balloons and planes 
were all active. 

" While near Compiegne doing refugee work, the Aus- 
tralians had had a fight near by. An Australian plane was 
forced to alight on account of engine trouble. I saw it 
strike its nose in an adjoining field and roll over once or 
twice all played out. I told my refugees to get out and 
hide, while I steered my machine over into the field, 
where the two were evidently badly mixed up with their 
apparatus. I found them alive and was able to unsnarl 
them, get them into my camionette and take them to their 
quarters, where they got the best of help possible. After 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 89 

this I returiie.d to mj refugees and got them to their desti- 
nation. The front was very active at just this time when 
the Germans were making great efforts to break through 
into the big forest all around there, and the camions were 
always by the roadside with soldiers ready to pull out 
towards the front, or to retreat at any minute, or to bring 
provisions." 

A further word as to the Transportation Department. 
The French Minister of the Interior, in July, 1917, sent 
a request to the Eed Cros's for aid in moving and caring 
for the "^ repatries " arriving at Evian through Switzer- 
land. The Transportation Department decided to under- 
take half this work, and ten ambulances and twenty men 
were sent there before the end of the month. It was from 
the beginning one of the most successful pieces of individ- 
ual effort performed by the Red Cross. Thousands of 
repatriated individuals, sick, unfit, and dejected, were 
brought through Switzerland, checked up by the proper 
authorities, transported to homes in the vicinity where they 
could recuperate, and later taken by the Red Cross to the 
trains awaiting to carry them to their destination. The 
work was so successful that in January, 1918, the Ameri- 
can Red Cross was again approached by the French gov- 
ernment and asked to take care of all the transportation 
work, and on and after February all the repatries through 
Switzerland were h'andled by the American Red Cross. 

In the midst of all its hospital work the Red Cross had 
given civilian relief in many villages. It set up relief 
centers where they were most needed and as it could not 
spare the personnel to run them, it put some competent 
villager in charge, and its rolling kitchens moved about 
from one point to another, feeding all the hungry who came 
to them, civilians, refugees, or soldiers. 

During that summer the military situation was critical. 
The fate of the Allies seemed to be hanging in a very deli- 
cate balance, and France and England were making super- 



90 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

huinaii efforts to throw their weight, to the last gun and 
the last man, into the arena where the issue was to be de- 
cided. Considering this the attention that France gave 
to her refugee problem was remarkable. Looking back at 
the situation one is struck with admiration at the feats 
she performed and proud that the Red Cross could relieve 
her of a few of her countless burdens, relatively small as 
the proportion was. 

In some of the industrial centers the increase of popula- 
tion, owing to an influx of refugees of all kinds, rose to 
twelve, fifteen and even to twenty-five per cent at a given 
time — more than the community could absorb. Some^ 
times this congestion was due to an official mistake and 
sometimes to the persistence of the people in seeking those 
towns where they believed they could find employment. 
Also it was not infrequently the case in some provinces 
that the Government provisions for benefiting refugees 
had, after functioning for a long time perhaps, been al- 
lowed to pass into peaceful desuetude. It was in the re- 
lief of such situations that the Eed Cross operated to par- 
ticular advantage. 

In the Department of the Loir-et-Cher, for example, 
nearly twenty thousand refugees arrived during the latter 
part of the summer, and the territory was already over- 
crowded. They came in one rush with absolutely no pos- 
sessions, not even sufficient clothing; some with limbs 
broken in the mad stampede, others bearing newly born 
children in their arms, for excitement and fear had as 
usual caused many premature births. There was the cus- 
tomary per cent of sick and many who were crazed with 
anxiety over the unknown fate of members of their 
families from whom they had becomei separated. 

It was not a simple matter to care for these twenty thou- 
sand fevered people; to doctor, feed and clothe them, and 
provide them with living accommodations. Before 1914, 
it would have been a different matter, but this district 
had borne a constantly increasing load of war burdens 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 91 

and already had had thousands of strangers billeted in its 
towns. It could not secure help from the neighboring De- 
partments which had enough to occupy them in their own 
pressing needs. The people of the Loir-et-Cher did not 
dream of shirking the work that had been put upon them, 
but when one has given till there is little if anything left 
to give, such a problem as the one they had to face in 
August of 1918 would have seemed almost insuperable but 
for the fact that the American Eed Cross was there to give 
its assistance. 

Other Departments were called upon to meet situations 
which in all their aspects were practically the same. 
There are no special reasons for choosing this or that one 
as an example, the object being merely to point out the 
fitness of the Red Cross as a cooperating agent in sup- 
plementing the French work of relief. 

Stationed in Paris was the main Civilian Relief Depart- 
ment with its executive personnel and its storehouses filled 
with supplies received from America or purchased in 
France. At various centers, which had been carefully 
selected after consultation with the French authorities and 
which were fed from the Paris stores, subsidiary ware- 
houses had been established that were within comparatively 
easy reach of the corps of field-workers and delegates sta- 
tioned in all the Departments from which or to which the 
refugees were being moved. The transportation of these 
stores — except the long hauls — was entirely done by the 
Red Cross. Such was, broadly speaking, the simple yet ef- 
fective system of the organization, but this, which may be 
called the mechanical part, was by no means all of the 
work. The other side, the human side, has already been 
touched upon. 

The Red Cross delegates sent out from Paris were of 
course duly accredited by the Ministry of the Interior, 
but thereafter it was up to them to establish diplomatic 
relations with the authorities of the Departments. The 
first step was usually a formal call upon the Prefet and 



92 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the Maire, sometimes upon the leading ecclesiastic of the 
special diocese, for the cooperation of these '^ powers " 
was essential to success. Thereafter the work of the dele- 
gate was largely done by means of donations of money or 
goods to the French relief societies already in the field; 
hut under certain conditions the delegate formed his own 
societies or committees to look after the interests of various 
districts. As a rule he requested the authorities to ap- 
point several persons to meet in special conference with 
a view to forming a permanent advisory and executive com- 
mittee. When this had been chosen a visiting committee 
of the leading interested citizens was formed, to look into 
the condition of the refugee families. " Questionnaires " 
were drawn up, which when filled out gave in brief all the 
necessary information concerning those who asked for aid. 
All possible pains were taken both to relieve actual want 
and to guard against wasteful giving. 

The ample funds of the Ked Cross not only enabled it 
to assist these people, but its spirit was such that it could 
give without hurting their pride. There has been a good 
deal said about French thrift and French willingness to 
take. Such generalizations are no truer of France than 
of the United States. If they hold on more firmly to what 
they have than we do, it is because they have had to work 
harder to acquire it and because the opportunities for gain 
among them are infinitely less than with us. It is quite as 
easy to hurt their pride by forcing charity upon them 
as it is to hurt ours. It is easier, in fact, for the French 
are not so used to general charity. They are independent 
and individualistic to a degree. That the Red Cross es- 
tablished with these people a real bond of union and 
aroused in many a deep, personal feeling of affection for 
the people of the United States is proof enough of the 
abiding value of the work of the organization. 

Within a few days after the allied advance at Chateau- 
Thierry many of the refugees from that section began to 
creep back toward their homes. Their dogged attachment 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 93 

to the soil was cliaracteristic. Whenever a few kilometers 
of ground were gained by the Allies a certain per cent 
of that part of the population which had not ebbed very 
far behind the lines in its retreat, flowed back again in- 
sistently. It was like water seeking its own level. Often 
a sudden movement of the lines would drive them to the 
rear again. Thus many of them fluctuated, living from 
hand to mouth, but always obstinate in their efforts to ac- 
complish a few repairs upon their houses or to sow a hand- 
ful of seeds. They sheltered themselves after a fashion 
in cellars and caves and improvised lean-tos, and however 
ragged and rain-soaked and hungry they stuck to the skirts 
of the armies, inching forward whenever the chance of- 
fered, retreating undismayed when forced to by shot and 
shell. 

From the battle areas ahead other fugitives were always 
coming, who had no hope of a return to their ruined vil- 
lages and who were unfitted to cope unaided with the con- 
ditions into which war had thrown them. The Eed Cross 
came forward to help both these classes. That the Ger- 
mans had torn the reconstruction work of many months to 
pieces and captured relief supplies were not suflicient rea- 
sons for a change of program. The same needs that had 
existed before were still present back of the fighting lines, 
the needs of food, shelter, clothing, medicines, and tools. 
In the crushing disaster that occurred when the enemy in- 
vaded the area where reconstruction had been begun one 
thing at least had not been destroyed, the fine relationship 
that had grown up between the French and the American 
Eed Cross. 

One of the first canteens started after the Allies had 
begun their counter-offensive was at the Chateau-Thierry 
front. Another was located at Essommes where a con- 
siderable unit Avas stationed to look out for the needs of 
that part of the Chateau-Thierry-Soissons salient. The 
Red Cross contributed largely to the support of the " Har- 
vesters' Canteens," operated by the Comite Americaine 



94 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

for tlie benefit of the farmers returning to salvage their 
crops. The American offensive at St. Mihiel had then 
been launched and the Ked Cross had prepared for it by 
establishing base warehouses at Beauvais, Compiegne, 
Chateau-Thierry, and Sainte-Menehoulde, filling them to 
the roof with medical and other supplies for the United 
States Army. 

Comparatively speaking there were not many casualties 
during the taking of the St. Mihiel salient and what work 
the Red Cross had to do in connection with the American 
Army was well handled. In fact the Eed Cross had 
planned for a much bigger job than it was called upon to 
perform. After the St. Mihiel offensive was finished and 
the troops had established themselves there followed the 
advance of the French in the Champagne country under 
the command of General Gouraud of the Fourth Army. 
Six American divisions were with the French. 

The Eed Cross handled the work in this zone so capably 
that General Nivelle wrote a personal letter thanking it 
for line service it had rendered their division. In this of- 
fensive the Eed Cross maintained a system of couriers on 
motorcycles and kept its advance team right back of the 
lines, moving forward as each triage hospital was moved. 
The couriers were in constant contact with the Eed Cross 
divisional representatives and with the medical sections of 
the divisions, and delivered newspapers directly into the 
lines. Two of these couriers were very badly wounded 
in the performance of their duties. The Eed Cross had 
canteens at practically all of the hospitals and all the dress- 
ing stations, many of which were under shell-fire every 
night. 

When General Gouraud began to ease up a little in his 
attack, the Argonne, another purely American offensive, 
was started, and at the same time the British, with two 
American divisions, commenced their drive further north. 
The Eed Cross had work to do everywhere, work that 
taxed its personnel and transportations to the limits of 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 95 

their capacity. The British soon were hitting the enemy's 
lines all the way up from Verdun to the Belgian sector and 
the displaced population of the villages in the war areas 
were flying back toward the heart of France. 

In the meanwhile the Red Cross was helping the op- 
posite currents of refugees of the Aisne and the Marne, 
including the returning farmers. Although a portion of 
the wheat crop had been ruined enough remained to pay 
for the trouble of gathering it. The French army helped 
in the harvesting with scythes, mowing machines, and 
rakes furnished by the Eed Cross. Trenches and shell- 
holes and miles of barbed- wire entanglements rendered 
the work slow and laborious. In many places the pres- 
ence of quantities of unexploded grenades and shells made 
the use of the mowers so dangerous that the harvesting 
had to be done by hand. While this was going on an 
important refugee center was established at Amiens, which 
at that time was occupied by only four hundred citizens ; 
but though its native population was reduced to this small 
band, fugitives were always passing through. A Red 
Cross canteen and vestiaire were started, with quarters for 
those who needed a temporary lodging. One of the person- 
nel always slept at the canteen to be ready to receive these 
wayfarers, who not infrequently arrived at the almost de- 
serted city at some black hour of the night. 

While the situation of the refugees who had been sent in 
large numbers to the centers further back was less dramatic, 
it was grave enough urgently to demand relief. Rouen 
was one of the points that had been selected as a kind of 
clearing-house for these people. From this city they were 
distributed throughout the Department, but this was work 
which took time and the longer the delay the worse the 
plight of the refugees became. They were, as always, old 
men and women and children, worn out with fatigue and 
shock and weak from hunger. The Red Cross built rest- 
barracks for them in the public square and a dispensary 
that treated hundreds of sick. During the spring and 



96 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

summer from five to fifteen hundred refugees passed 
through Rouen every day. 

In other towns, such as Auxerre, Avallon, and Joigny, 
important places in the Department of the Yonne, the Red 
Cross organized French committees which it supplied with 
beds, tables, chairs, and other household goods, with in- 
structions to offer them to the refugees at a price rep- 
resenting about three-fifths of the cost to the organiza- 
tion, payment to be made in monthly installments. This 
lack of furniture and kitchen utensils was practically a 
universal one among the refugees and had at first been met 
by the voluntary contributions of the French, but when 
the Red Cross began its relief work this source of supply 
had been drained and the factories were not making any 
cheap furniture such as was needed. 

The Minister of the Interior, when asked by the Bureau 
of Refugees what it could do, spoke first and most emphat- 
ically of this need. As the supplies in the stores were 
practically exhausted and transportation was difficult, the 
Red Cross delegates of the various Departments hunted 
up small saw-mills where such furniture could be manu- 
factured and had it made in the simplest way. The main 
object was to enable the refugees to begin again as much 
as possible their normal lives, and without a room and 
some few belongings they could call their own this result 
could not have been reached. The moral effect upon them 
of having a " f oyer,'^ as the French call it, was invaluable. 
It lifted them from the waif-and-stray class and gave them 
privacy and a certain standing. The fact that the furni- 
ture supplied by the Red Cross was sold and not given 
to them added to their feeling of self-respect. 

Many of these people had been prosperous and thrifty 
and had brought their savings with them. They would 
have bought furniture at the stores if any had been ob- 
tainable-, but the Red Cross was practically the only agency 
through which it could be had and they were glad to get 
it at the extremely moderate prices and on the easy terms 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 97 

asked. To have given everything to them outright might 
in the end have had an undesirable influence upon these 
two million and more displaced people. There was danger 
of pauperizing them. 

Innumerable stories could be told of the need of furni- 
ture among the refugees. One Red Cross district worker 
found the family of a miner living in a half-basement. 
The pale sickly children had been sleeping on the bare 
damp stones without even a layer of straw beneath their 
little bodies. A small fire in an open fireplace in one 
comer was the sole suggestion of comfort. There was 
not an article of furniture in the room. The miner had 
tried to get some — he was earning enough to buy a few 
pieces — but there was absolutely none to be had in the 
stores, and when he found that the Eed Cross could furnish 
him w^ith beds, mattresses, and other simple household 
articles, and all for a small sum, his gratitude was touch- 
ing. 

Those who opposed the selling plan at first soon realized 
its great advantages. They found that the refugees pre- 
ferred to pay: it gave them a feeling of ownership they 
would not othei^wise have had. They saw also that it 
stimulated the desire to obtain work in order that the in- 
stallments might be paid, and this element was of the ut- 
most importance. The moment that the refugees had 
roofs over their heads, some little property of their own 
if only a bed, a few chairs and a table, and paying occupa- 
tion for their hands, they became self-respecting members 
of the community and no longer a pressing problem to it. 

The money received from the furniture sales constituted 
a fund which was used to buy other things necessary for 
the maintenance of the refugees, such as kitchen utensils, 
sewing machines and stoves, or cows, rabbits, chickens, 
and other livestock. It was usually turned over to the 
French relief societies with whom the Refugee Bureau 
was cooperating, as they were more closely in touch with 
the changing needs of the people. From every side the 



98 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

plan was probably the best one that conld have been de- 
vised. Of course in those cases where real poverty existed, 
where there were mothers with large families and no wage- 
earners, for example, the Ked Cross gave furniture out- 
right, and it often added a cooking-stove, or a sewing-ma- 
chine which was used by many families in common. 

In some Departments where refugees had congregated 
the greatest need was housing ; in others fuel, and so on ; 
but it was almost always of prime importance to find em- 
ployment for them. In ten Departments employment 
bureaus were founded by the Eed Cross and where there 
were no possible jobs into which the newcomers could be 
fitted the same organization established workrooms, often 
in cooperation with the French societies. In all sixty- 
eight of these workrooms were provided. In certain sec- 
tions the Eed Cross furnished inducements for farmers 
to settle upon the land and near Bourges it obtained from 
the Government the right to let more than four thousand 
acres for cultivation. 

During the months that the American Army had been in 
France an enormous amount of used and soiled clothing 
had accumulated. When the question of salvaging this 
arose a great deal of it was turned over to the various Eed 
Cross bureaus of relief which had suggested that a double 
purpose would be served by letting the work of repairing 
and cleansing be done by refugees. 

This very simple work proved a blessing to many thou- 
sand women who were anxious to do tasks that were not 
beyond their strength. One of the representatives in the 
Vendee relates with what eagerness it was received. The 
following telegram had been received from an officer of 
the Salvage Service : " If you can launder as well as darn 
socks will send two car-loads immediately. Twenty-five 
centimes per pair for repairing and laundering, ten cen- 
times for those only needing washing. Wire if you can 
handle." 

The answer was prompt and in the affirmative. The 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 99 

cars arrived and were hailed with joy by the refugees 
whoj while they had been fed and clothed, had been given 
no occupation for their hands and minds. They had had 
nothing to do but sit and grieve over their losses, or let 
their thoughts dwell upon the inhuman treatment to which 
the Germans had subjected them. The moment they were 
busy the refugees began to take more interest in life. A 
noticeable mental and physical change for the better was 
apparent before the end of the second week and the work- 
ers themselves unhesitatingly attributed it to the fact that 
they were no longer idle. 

Three hundred women a week were employed at this 
station for two months, washing and mending socks, gloves, 
sweaters, mufflers, puttees and underwear for the dough- 
boys. 'No sooner had the salvage work been finished than 
the call came for " comfort bags " for the American Army, 
and for two months more these refugee women were busy 
at this job. 

In one town a large fire threw out of employment some 
fifteen hundred garment makers, among whom were many 
refugees. In times of peace such a blow to the earning 
capacity of the community would have been bad enough, 
but during the war any upset of labor was trebly serious 
and demanded an immediate remedy. The district dele- 
gate of the Eed Cross offered the services of the organiza- 
tion and after a conference with a committee of citizens it 
was decided that a relief fund should be given by the town, 
the factory management and the prefecture jointly, while 
the Eed Cross should furnish the food necessary to tide 
the unemployed over the crisis. The organization also 
provided sewing-machines which it sold at half price on 
the installment plan, the refugee paying five or ten francs 
a month. 

The Red Cross representatives at various military base 
hospitals had at that time begun to send in requests for 
comfort bags. These were simple cloth affairs which were 
used to hold the small personal effects of the patients: 



100 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

their razors, combs, money, letters, and various odds and 
ends. To tlie uninitiated they would seem of little im- 
portance, but as a matter of fact they meant a great deal 
to the wounded soldier, who felt for his few possessions a 
sentiment quite out of proportion to their value. The 
first thing he did on being placed in his ward was to ask 
about them. In some indefinable way it lessened his feel- 
ing of loneliness to have them near him. This was soon 
recognized in the hospitals as a medical fact and the com- 
fort-bag became an institution and occupied its place of 
honor at the head of every bed. Through the agency of 
the Eed Cross, which furnished the material, refugee 
women, otherwise unemployed, were set to work making 
them at two francs per dozen. On an average one worker 
could make from three and one-half to five dozen a day, 
and in this way many a mother was enabled to support 
her family. 'Not only were they happy at becoming wage- 
earners, but the feeling that they personally were doing 
something for the American soldiers gave them universal 
pleasure. 

Many of the refugees were too old to do even the lightest 
forms of labor and when these had no relatives or friends 
to take them in the Red Cross cared for them in special 
refuges such as those it established in the south of France. 
In the Basses Pyrenees it maintained a home for mothers 
and children who were so depleted in strength that they 
were unable to work. These were not ill enough to be 
hospital cases. Fear had become in them almost a dis- 
ease that was sapping their mental and physical health 
and the problem of nursing them back to courage and 
a sound condition of body was extremely difficult. Fre- 
quently at first the children would scream hysterically 
when approached by a Red Cross representative. Their 
conception of a uniform was that it was something worn by 
the Germans. When the wrecked nerves of these little 
ones were healed they were sent to school. The women, 
who were all from the E^orth and factory workers as a 



THE NEW OFFENSIVE 101 

rule, were curiouslj enough seldom able to sew. An ex- 
pert seamstress was engaged to teach those who had re- 
covered their health to cut garments and make them into 
clothes. Those who could do nothing else were obliged 
to keep their rooms clean and tidy. 

For the American Red Cross delegate the refugee with 
his divers needs furnished a constant field for study and 
work. Among a thousand families scattered throughout a 
given Department in town and village there were sure to 
be many groups who were trained in some form of occu- 
pation that could be made useful to themselves and the 
community. It was the delegate's mission to find out 
these conditions either from personal visits, or those of his 
visiting committees, or by inquiry among local authorities 
and neighbors, and after consultation with the French 
bureaus, to draw up some practical plan of Red Cross aid 
to lay before Headquarters at Paris. His duties required 
broad sympathy and tact as well as good judgment and con- 
stant activity. They brought him into the closest contact 
with the French people from the highest official of the pre- 
fecture department to the most humble peasant of the coun- 
tryside. He learned to know them and was known by 
them. 

The bare figures in the reports of the Bureau — one mil- 
lion four hundred thousand dollars given in one month by 
the American Red Cross to refugee relief, one million and 
a quarter garments furnished, nine hundred tons of food 
stuffs distributed, etc. — are full of significance, but they 
do not tell the whole story, much of whose beauty lies in 
the establishment of a real bond of union between America 
and the people of France through the medium of the 
refugee relief worker, a bond which goes deeper and is 
more abiding than Government policies. 



CHAPTEE IX 

WORK AMONG THE CHILDEEIT 

IT is not to 'be inferred tliat the Eed Cross set itself up 
as the discoverer and teacher of the principles of child- 
welfare work abroad, for if anything it was the other way 
around, some of our most valuable ideas having been bor- 
rowed from France, and there were few details of the 
system upon which she was not already well informed. 
The Eed Cross had, however, the advantage of Erench 
societies in that all of these details had been tested out 
in the United States and that the organization could 
bring to bear upon the situation large funds and a corps 
of experts whose knowledge was practical instead of theo- 
retical; but it had no startling truths to communicate. 

The Bureau, in the course of its operation in Erance, 
worked toward more than one end and conducted various 
classes of activities which are best considered separately. 

Its first and most obvious duty was to meet the exigen- 
cies in the child-welfare situation created by the war itself. 
Under this heading fell the rather extensive arrangements 
which were carried out for the care, feeding, and medical 
attendance for refugee children, with the establishment of 
camps, barracks, and temporary hospitals. Here also must 
be classed the provisions made for carrying on the ordinary 
hospital and dispensary services for the children of the 
cities, which in many cases would otherwise have had 
to be discontinued because of the taking over of hospitals 
for military purposes, the loss of medical and nursing 
personnel, and lack of funds. So far as it was able the 
Bureau met the situation by furnishing temporary hos- 
pitals, by supplying drugs, nurses, and physicians to dia- 

102 



WORK AMONG THE CHILDREN 103 

pensaries, and often by assuming all or part of the ex- 
pense of maintenance of such institutions until such time 
as thej were once more able to operate for themselves. 
In some cases in districts where there was special need it 
established temporary dispensaries of its own. 

The second class of activities had for its object a stimu- 
lation of constructive child-welfare work and an assistance 
in its development. To understand the reasons for this, 
which on first thought might seem American presump- 
tion in a country which has had so much to do with 
progress along this line, one must know something of 
present conditions in France. 

Por various social and economic reasons the birth-rate 
in France has shown a steady and alarming decline for 
many years, so that even before the war there were, for 
the whole country, considerably fewer births than deaths. 
The mobilization of the men necessarily lessened the 
number of children born. The great increase in deaths 
due to the war and the added economic burdens have 
rendered any rapid rise in the birth-rate improbable. 
Thus a situation has been created which must strike any 
observer^ as grave and which has greatly alarmed the 
French themselves. 

The methods prevalent throughout France for the 
reduction of infant mortality have had many excellent 
features and the infant death rate has been held at a point 
which would not be considered especially serious for a 
more prolific race. In fact the infant mortality for the 
country at large has been less than in America and system- 
atic infant-welfare work, so far as the clinical aspects are 
concerned, has been as general, if not more general than 
with us. The weak spot in the French system has been 
the lack of properly trained nurses and this, together with 
the other conditions mentioned, has brought things to a 
point where the very existence of the race seems to be at 
stake and where no possible effort for the saving of infant 
life can be spared. 



104 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

To deal with sncli a problem is by no means easy. 
While it is comparatively a simple matter to bring about 
a great reduction in an abnormally high mortality, every 
appreciable improvement in a community where the rate 
is already reasonably low means a very great increase in 
expenditure of money and effort. Moreover, infant wel- 
fare work is not at all an exact science and each situation 
must be studied for itself and specific methods adopted to 
suit it. For France, seriously exhausted and impoverished 
by war, to meet this, in addition to all its other pressing 
needs, meant an almost superhuman effort. To the 
Eed Cross it seemed a fitting part of its war relief work 
that it should give the children of France all the aid in its 
power while the integrity of the country was at stake. 

To attempt to spread its comparatively small resources 
over the whole field would have been futile, and equally 
absurd would have been any attempt to Americanize 
French methods of dealing with their own people. The 
Eed Cross chance for service seemed to be to use its 
available trained medical and nursing personnel, as well 
as its material resources, to help the French work out the 
special problems that presented themselves, in the light 
of American as well as French experience; to aid in the 
establishment in favorable localities of centers of effort 
which might serve at once as a stimulus toward, and in a 
sense as models for, similar development elsewhere; to 
further the spread of needed educational propaganda for 
better child hygiene; and finally, to assist in providing 
means of education for the workers, medical and social, 
necessary for any extensive campaign for the preservation 
of infant life. 

These various aims were kept in view throughout the 
period of Red Cross service in France, and every effort, was 
made, for example in the dispensaries operated for the 
French as well as those opened by the Bureau itself, to 
adapt such methods as have been especially developed in 
America to French conditions and to combine them with 



WORK AMONG THE CHILDREN 105 

the metliods already in operation in France. Of the meth- 
ods which have had a peculiarly American development, 
perhaps the most characteristic is the routine use of the 
public health nurse and the social worker, often combined 
in one person, to form the connection between hospital and 
dispensary and the home of the patient, to see that the 
physician's orders are carried out, to acquire information 
concerning home conditions and social relations, and to 
assist in all possible ways in remedying such of these as 
may have a bad influence upon the patient's physical 
well-being. 

Public health nursing had not been developed in France 
before the war, and trained nurses and social workers were 
not as common as in America. Work of this kind was 
not so often carried on, though examples of it were found 
in some French organizations. Wherever the Children's 
Bureau carried on such a work it did so through its 
American trained child-welfare nurses and it also, in 
almost every district, arranged for the training of French 
women in the essentials of this type of social service, both 
by theoretical teaching and practical experience in the field 
under American guidance. In Paris, for instance, an 
arrangement was made with the French society of Infir- 
mieres Yisiteuses, under which a considerable number of 
young French women went through a course consisting of 
lectures by prominent French specialists and practical work 
in dispensaries which fitted them for the prophylactic 
social work of a child-welfare campaign, though no pre- 
tense was made of giving them such nursing training as 
would fit them to care for sick children. 

Of these women many are now employed in French 
child-welfare stations formerly assisted by the Children's 
Bureau, some are doing relief work for children in the 
devastated regions, and others have been placed with 
various Franch organizations. 

The experience of the Bureau w^th this home-visiting 
service has gone far to settle an objection raised by inter- 



106 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

ested French people. While admitting the value of the 
service they had been quite inclined to believe that their 
fellow countrymen were fundamentally so different from 
the citizens of America, so much more insistent upon the 
privacy of the home, that they would never welcome this 
kind of intrusion. As the home visitor had proved ac- 
ceptable to all classes of American immigrants, the Eed 
Cross did not put much faith in this objection and in prac- 
tical experience it has had, if anything, less trouble in 
carrying on the work in France than at home. It would 
seem that the French distrust of innovations had probably 
more to do with the criticism than any other important 
difference between the two peoples. Almost every French 
organization for which the Bureau has installed, or made a 
demonstration of such a system, has been enthusiastic over 
the results and it seems probable that while French thrift 
and present financial conditions in the country will pre- 
vent its being carried out on the American scale, the in- 
stitution of the VisiteiLses d'Hygiene, which was also being 
introduced by the Rockefeller Commission at the same 
time, will meet with growing favor. 

Allied with the work of the home visitors was the system 
of keeping social histories of the families visited, by means 
of a central clearing house, to avoid duplication of effort 
by different organizations. This did not apply simply to 
child-welfare work, for other agencies than the Children's 
Bureau united with it to promote the establishment of 
such oflfices as the Fichier Central in Paris created by the 
Bureau of Refugees of the A. R, C. to assist in coordinat- 
ing various kinds of philanthropic work. 

The Fichier consisted of a comprehensive index of needy 
families. It was established upon slips in double series — 
one of proper names in alphabetical order, the other of 
streets similarly arranged. These were made up from the 
lists of families or individuals helped by various charitable 
societies, and the greater the number of societies which put 



WORK AMONG THE CHILDREN 107 

themselves in touch with the system the more valuable the 
work of the bureau became. 

Any one who desired to aid in cases of alleged want con- 
sulted the bureau whose files revealed whether the cases 
were or were not deserving. They might for example 
show that the cases had already been sufficiently well taken 
care of by other charitable organizations. The system was 
impersonal and impartial. It guarded the privacy of those 
in need as well as made their wants known and enabled as- 
sistance to be given with rapidity and precision. More- 
over it acted as a bond between the various charitable 
societies, placing the information and experience of all 
at the disposal of each one. That its usefulness was 
quickly appreciated was proved by the fact that the number 
of families inscribed upon its lists rose from forty-five 
hundred to fifty thousands in about -Qyo months. 



CHAPTER X 

MEUETHE-ET-MOSELLE 

OT^E of the most urgent needs that faced the Children's 
Bureau at the outset arose from the situation of the 
children of the devastated areas in what was known as 
the Zone des Armees. This Zone, which extended along 
the irregular front lines of the enemy, was ahout thirty 
miles deep and the majority of towns within it were wholly 
or partially destroyed or in constant danger from shell fire 
and aerial bomhing and exposed to sudden military in- 
vasion from one side or the other. 

Many of the inhabitants had deserted this battle-scarred 
area during the early years of the war, but there were 
occupied villages left when the American Eed Cross ar- 
rived in France and from these old men and women and 
children were constantly being sent back, sometimes for 
short periods only during acute bombardments, at other 
times for what amounted to a permanent evacuation. 

The situation was particularly acute in the Department 
of the Meurthe-et-Moselle of which the chief city is ^ancy, 
often called, because of its beauty, " the little Paris." It 
stands close to the border and it was almost an axiom at 
the beginning of hostilities that it would be at the mercy 
of the hordes of the enemy as soon as they wished to take 
it and that the Uhlans, without firing a shot, would en- 
camp in its Place Stanislas. 

The Germans did in fact strike in that quarter almost 
at once, their main goal being the military stronghold of 
Toul, situated a short distance to the west. Their army 
swept forward till it reached a point about thirteen kilo- 
meters away from the outskirts of the city. The Kais'er 

108 



MEURTHE-ET-MOSELLE 109 

himself was with his troops and was preparing to make a 
triumphal entry upon his famous white horse, hut the 
victory that seemed already in his hands proved elusive. 
The French resistance stiffened. The Germans were held 
where they were and dug themselves in, foreseeing that the 
way to their ohjective was not to he reached as easily as 
they had expected. 

They never reached it though they brought fire and death 
and worse than death to all the countryside. In the whole 
history of the war there are no blacker pages than those 
that record the deeds of the Germans in this region. 
Fugitives from the burning villages poured into JSTancy 
and the city itself suffered repeatedly from the bombard- 
ments and the attacks of aeroplanes, but under the courage- 
ous leadership of Prefet Mirman and the Mayor of the 
city, the people remained calmly industrious. JSTo one 
who could work was permitted to be idle. The war had 
brought about an unusual condition: free-thinkers fra- 
ternized with ardent Catholics, and Socialists went hand- 
in-hand with the most notorious reactionaries, all busy at 
some useful occupation, either in the factories or the newly 
created municipal work-shops for making sand-bags, 
musettes, gas-masks, or mattresses for the troops. In the 
center of the city a shop was established where the women 
made lace and embroidery. 

But in spite of its spirit, life was hard in !N"ancy, 
especially for the children, whose diet and normal outdoor 
life were very much interfered with. The population of 
the city had decreased since the beginning of the war not- 
withstanding the number who sought refuge there, but it 
was large enough to make its maintenance a constant prob- 
lem and it was difficult to give the little ones the sort 
of care necessary in a to^vn where bombardments were 
frequent. The same conditions were true of the neighbor- 
ing towns in which fugitives had gathered. 

The Department of the Meurthe-et-Moselle was a most 
important munition center. Scattered along the valleys of 



110 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the two rivers were great usines for the production of 
materials of war. Some of these towns were exposed 
to shell-fire from the German guns which " strafed " them 
more or less regularly: all of them were subject to aerial 
raids. When the weather was favorable few nights passed 
that the German bombing-planes did not visit some sec- 
tion of the region, striving to wreck the factories and 
break the spirit of the people. Many of the civilian hos- 
pitals were closed, or had suffered a curtailment of their 
services owing to the fact that practically all of the doctors 
and infirmieres were enrolled in army hospitals. The 
various charitable organizations, never broadly developed, 
were hampered by war conditions. Homes were daily de- 
stroyed by air-raids and families broken up, leaving 
mothers helpless to perform the double duty of working 
in the factories and caring for their children. When the 
Germans began to use gas-bombs, the towns near the front 
lines became practically untenable for children who were 
too young to appreciate the necessity of wearing masks. 
Such was the general situation in this section which the 
Ked Cross was called upon to relieve. 

In the summer of 1917 a particularly severe gas attack 
and air-raid drove several hundred children from their 
homes. The Prefet of the Department already had on his 
hands as many refugees as he could well care for and in 
this emergency he called upon the A. F. F. W., the Ameri- 
can Fund for French Wounded, for aid. The work of re- 
lief was more than that society could undertake alone. 
The Red Cross therefore lent its cooperation, and a small 
corps of doctors and nurses from both organizations were 
sent to ^ancy with food and supplies. 

The children had been gathered together at the French 
military barracks situated on the summit of a hill between 
Nancy and Toul. The harraquement possessed no hospital 
equipment and, as it stood, was not suitable for an orphan- 
age, but there was no alternative. Moreover the mothers 
were not willing to send their children farther into France 



MEURTHE-ET-MOSELLE 111 

where they would be unable to visit them. The site itself 
was favorable in that it was isolated and therefore com- 
paratively safe. 

The personnel lent by the A. F. F. W. soon left to re- 
turn to their special duties, leaving the work in the hands 
of the Red Cross at that time establishing its Children's 
Bureau, which had received its start through a fund raised 
in the city of Boston. The force of Bed Cross representa- 
tives at the Asile Caserne du Luxembourg, as the harraque- 
ment at Toul was called, worked well, handicapped as they 
were by their small numbers, to put the buildings into 
proper condition to house the children. An infirmary was 
started and a few dispensaries opened in the vicinity of 
ISTancy, but these by no means met the increasing emergen- 
cies arising in the department which was very much in 
need of this form of service. 

About the beginning of the winter the Bed Cross sent 
a large personnel to Toul with instructions to expand the 
field of activity. The fact that this important ammuni- 
tion center lay so close to the German lines cannot be 
over-emphasized. Great battles such as those waged along 
the line toward the north and northwest were not being 
fought out here, but the enemy were harassing it constantly 
with artillery and aeroplanes and seeking with equal 
assiduity to undermine its morale by the most insidious 
forms of propaganda. There were few men left in the de- 
partment. All who were fit had been mobilized and their 
women were cariying on at the factories and trying to 
look after their children at the same time. Wounded 
poilus often said to the nurses at the military hospitals: 
"It is all right for us. We are being well taken care 
of here, but what is becoming of our wives and little 
ones ? " No provision had been made by the French for 
the medical care of the families of the soldiers on that 
front. 

Whatever work the Bed Cross could do among the homes 
would have its direct influence upon the men who had been 



112 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

bearing tlie horrors of tlie trenches so long and with such 
wonderful patience. This was one of the factors that de- 
termined the organization to develop the hospital at Asile 
Caserne du Luxembourg and extend its medical service 
to cover every important town in the Department. 

The infirmary already started was speedily enlarged and 
contributory dispensaries installed at such main towns as 
were focal points of the little brood of villages round about 
them. At each dispensary was a doctor, a children's nurse, 
an automobile and a chauffeur. In the small near by vil- 
lages clinical posts were established, in the Mairie or the 
school-house perhaps, which were visited every day by the 
personnel from the main town, one such unit being able 
to look after six or seven towns. 

Before long there were base dispensaries at T'oug, 
E'ancy, N'euve-Maison, Luneville, and at fipinal, each with 
its outlying clinics. Besides the simple medical treat- 
ment given the patients the Bed Cross tried to teach the 
mothers the laws of cleanliness, diet, hygiene, both by talk 
and attractive cards and pamphlets. The minor ills of 
many of the children were due to the fact that they were 
not kept clean. If they were inadequately clad, shoes 
and warm underclothing and other garments were pro- 
vided. A fine friendly relation grew up between these 
people and the Bed Cross, to whom they took many of their 
troubles and from whom they always received aid, if aid 
was justified. 

There were very few cases where there was any attempt 
made to take advantage of this spirit of helpfulness. On 
the contrary the people often showed a delicacy of feeling 
remarkable considering their needs. It was customary for 
the Bed Cross, where there was real destitution, to grant 
the family credit at some local provision store for a few 
weeks. When these people failed to report for further 
aid one of the personnel would be sent to investigate. 
Sometimes the women had found employment and were 
supporting themselves, but others had another reason for 



MEURTHE-ET-MOSELLE 113 

their absence. " You have been so kind as to help ns for 
some weeks," they said; "we couldn't come again." In 
the town of Foug a woman sold a pair of shoes that the 
Red Cross had given her. They were too small for the 
child and the mother was desperately poor, but the act 
aroused a tumult of indignation and the citizens almost 
drove her out of the town because she had sold a gift of the 
American Red Cross. 

The work spread until the monthly consultations 
numbered about nine thousand. When an examination 
at the clinic showed that a child was seriously ill or needed 
an operation it was taken to the Asile Caserne du Luxem- 
bourg. Thus the dispensaries fed the hospitals and the 
growth of the two kept pace. The number of operations, 
many of them major operations, ran between one hundred 
and sixty to one hundred and seventy-five a month. 

The system worked smoothly and effectively for the con^ 
fidence of the people had been won. The mothers thought 
little of walking twenty or thirty kilometers with their 
babies in their arms, so great was their desire to have the 
American doctors examine them. The little refugees per- 
manently installed at the barracks were so well looked 
after that they lost their nervousness and depression and 
their ill-nourished bodies grew plump and healthy. !N'ot a 
single death occurred among them while they were under 
Red Cross care. One of the buildings had been turned 
into a school-room where they studied under French 
teachers. Hours of recreation were set apart during which 
they were taught to play vigorous and interesting outdoor 
games. It was pathetic to see their apathy and awkward- 
ness at first, but they soon entered into the sports with as 
much zest as any young Americans. 

About seven hundred women and children, mainly 
refugees from the towns destroyed by the Germans in the 
Lorraine sector, were housed at the barracks. As the 
Germans had seized most of the cattle in the Department 
the securing of sufficient milk was always a problem, but 



114 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the Eed Cross managed in one way or another to provide 
enough for the babies. The baby problem at Nancy was 
meanwhile becoming acute; or rather the problem of car- 
ing for maternity cases for which there existed no adequate 
provision. The small accommodations that did exist were 
finally destroyed one night during a bombing-raid by the 
enemy during which several of the women in the hospital 
miscarried. The Prefet turned to the Eed Cross for aid. 

" How soon can you take care of these patients ? '^ he 
asked. The Eed Cross replied : " You can send them to- 
morrow." 

There were no extra supplies on hand. A rule that was 
later rescinded had been passed, forbidding the unit to 
draw upon the warehouses at Toul and Nancy without 
permission from Paris. As it was impossible to deal 
through Paris and meet the emergency, it was necessary 
to strip the hospital at Toul of the needed material. By 
doubling up here and there — putting two children in one 
cot — by begging sheets and blankets from the American 
Fund for French Wounded and by requisitioning other 
supplies wherever it was possible, wards for fourteen 
women and ten babies were equipped within the twenty- 
four hours. One hour after the arrival of the patients 
from Nancy the first babies were bom. 

From that time on to the day the Eed Cross withdrew 
from the refugee home, the maternity hospital became a 
fixed part of the institution. When supplies were obtained 
from Paris it was enlarged to forty-six beds with twenty 
cribs and at the end about fifty babies a month were being 
born there. 

While the Eed Cross work at Toul was at its height the 
battle at Chateau-Thierry began. The French had learned 
that the Germans were preparing for a great drive through 
Lorraine. In consequence they deemed it possible that 
they might have to fall back and strengthen the lines that 
must block the way to Paris, giving up such military bases 
as Luneville, Nancy, and Toul. This would mean the 



MEURTHE-ET-MOSELLE 115 

evacuation of nearly sixty tlioiisand people. In the emer- 
gency the authorities appealed to the Red Cross, who laid 
its plans to make an orderly retreat with the refugees and 
to use its personnel to man the postes de secours estab- 
lished by the French. Temporary accommodations were 
provided at Bois d'Eveque for the seven hundred and 
fifty persons living at the Caserne du Luxembourg and 
food supplies for ten days were stored there. Eor two or 
three weeks, while things hung in the balance, a Red Cross 
medical unit was kept at Bois d'Jfiveque attending to the 
needs of the several thousand refugees who streamed into 
the place. 

Two weeks before the American offensive began at the 
St. Mihiel salient, the Red Cross unit at Toul received an 
order to turn the formation into a military hospital of 
twelve hundred or fifteen hundred beds. It was a blow to 
the civil community, but military necessity had to come 
first. The unit planned to establish a hospital for civilians 
to replace that at Toul, but this was not deemed expedient. 
Almost two hundred patients were sent to their homes. 
Those too sick to be so disposed of were carried to the 
American Red Cross civil hospital at jSTeufchateau. 
E'early five hundred children, women, and refugee work- 
ers, were entrained for the distant city of Lyon whither 
it had been ordered that the children should go. There 
were tears and many hopes expressed that some day they 
might return to Toul, but not one sign to indicate that 
they failed to appreciate the need for this radical change 
in their lives. 

The history of the military hospital at Toul does not 
belong here. The Red Cross unit with the generous co- 
operation of the Prefet, M. Mirman, — the right of dis- 
posing of the harraquements rested with the French civil 
authorities — made the requested change and on the day 
the American offensive opened had ready seven hundred 
beds completely equipped; eight hundrd cots and blankets 
in reserve ; an operating room of eight tables, with a ster- 



116 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

ilizing room and all tlie necessary medical and surgical 
equipment ; clothes for twenty-five hundred men, and food 
supplies, cooks and kitchens sufficient to care for fifteen 
hundred men a day for one month. 

That night three hundred American and German 
wounded arrived. Two hundred came the next night 
and as many more the night following. Then another 
change was instituted. The formation was turned from 
an evacuation into a base hospital and thereafter all of 
its fifteen hundred beds were occupied. In such manner 
did a civil hospital of the Eed Cross serve the needs of the 
American army in an emergency. 

At the beginning of the dispensary work the Red Cross 
had had an affiliation with the A. ~F. F. W. which had some 
personnel already on the spot, a certain amount of sup- 
plies, and had established a relationship with the people. 
The Red Cross furnished the doctors, the medical supplies, 
and the technical training, and it stood ready to provide 
funds where they were needed. The development and 
direction of the work really lay in the hands of the Red 
Cross, but the two organizations worked harmoniously to- 
gether. A separation was effected later, the Red Cross 
leaving the A. F. F. W. a sufficient number of doctors, 
whose salaries it paid up to the first of January so that 
the society could put its affairs in order. 

There is an interesting corollary to the closing of the 
civil hospital at Toul. The children who had been sent 
to Lyon were installed at Lachaux, but the time came 
when the American army needed more hospital space for 
its wounded and again the little ones were obliged to move. 
The Prefet consented to arrange for their reshipment 
back to Toul, but by some error no announcement was re- 
ceived until the day before the children arrived. The 
band of four hundred and fifty suddenly appeared at Toul 
where no accommodations had been provided for them. 
From there they were sent to Nancy where they were dis- 



MEURTHE-ET-MOSELLB llY 

tribiited among temporary quarters, or wherever possible 
returned to their families, but the majority remained a 
burden upon the community. The Red Cross considered 
that its obligations had not been fully discharged in this 
case and a gift of two hundred thousand francs was 
granted the Prefet for the future care of the homeless 
children. 

In the town of Foug practically all of the inhabitants 
were engaged in the making of munitions, under conditions 
resembling those found in so many factory towns of the 
United States. Restaurants, a cooperative store and a 
modem bath-house had been provided for the workmen 
and their families by the progressive foundry company. 
When the Red Cross dispensary was established there the 
directeur, impressed by the results it obtained, became 
so interested in the work of the organization that he offered 
to give the land, the labor, and the material for a per- 
manent hospital if the Red Cross would equip it and install 
a personnel of doctors, nurses and servants for the dura- 
tion of the war. The Red Cross agTeed and a brick and 
tile hospital, up-to-date in all its details, was built without 
delay. With its dispensary and milk station it forms to- 
day a model health center. At the end of the war it was 
taken over by the Women's Overseas Hospital Unit as 
agents for the A. F. F. W. to be continued by them for 
a short period, the directorate of the foundry having 
guaranteed to back it financially. 

Tuberculosis work was not undertaken on a large scale 
in the department of the Meurthe-et-Moselle, but the Red 
Cross established two cure d'airs, one at Nancy, the other 
at Luneville where some aid could be given pre-tubercular 
and early tubercular cases among children and young 
adults. As their name implies these cure d'airs were 
out-of-door rest-camps where the patients were pro- 
vided with three substantial meals a day, remain- 
ing in the open air under comfortable conditions 



118 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

from seven in the morning till six at night. Simple 
as the treatment was it brought about a remarkable im- 
provement in the condition of the majority of the sufferers, 
but the greatest value undoubtedly lay in the educational 
demonstration of a practical and inexpensive way of deal- 
ing with most cases of the disease at a period when relief 
and often cure may be readily secured. 

The work of the Eed Cross throughout the Department 
was warmly appreciated by the French who gave it their 
grateful cooperation. At one time the taking over of the 
Asile Caserne at Toul for military purposes was considered 
by the authorities. Before dispossessing the Eed Cross, 
then occupying the barracks, an investigation was made 
of the activities of the organization and these were judged 
so important that the plan was abandoned and the unit 
left in undisturbed possession of its quarters. That the 
civil authorities were equally convinced of its usefulness 
was proved in many ways not the least of which was the 
fact that at a time when the needs of the community were 
large the Eed Cross paid rent on only two properties in 
all the twenty-six towns in which it was, established. 



CHAPTEE XI 

PAEIS DISPENSAEIESi 

PAKIS and its immediate suburbs were the scene of 
great activity on the part of the Children's Bureau. 
Fourteen separate dispensaries were maintained or helped 
to operate in this particular district. The Bureau also 
established and conducted, in cooperation with the In- 
firmieres Visit euses de France, the training course already 
mentioned and put into good condition and operated for 
a considerable time a very large pouponniere which has 
now gone back to French management. It leaves be- 
hind, besides a number of improvements in the service of 
the various institutions and minor donations for their sup- 
port, three important and very different permanent foun- 
dations. 

The fourteenth Arrondissement, one of the largest and 
most densely populated portions of the city of Paris, has 
enjoyed the reputation of being in many ways a model. 
The Bureau, working in connection with the Mairie and 
some of the local organizations, selected this district as the 
scene of an interesting experiment. 

Under the direction of the Bureau an association was 
formed, known as the Patronage Franco-Americaine, which 
had for its object the systematic supervision of all babies 
bom in the arrondissement. The birth lists from the 
Mayor's office were followed up by the Visiteuses d'Hy- 
giene — the welfare visitors — and the babies cared for 
at three consultations des nourissons so situated as to be 
readily accessible to the whole quarter. 

The special feature of the arrangement was the pro- 
vision of a kind of " mothers' pensions," in order that the 

119 



120 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

women wlio otherwise would have to wean their babies 
and go to work might be enabled to stay at home and 
nurse them. This was done on rather a large scale with 
money furnished by the Red Cross and the results have 
seemed to be excellent, not only in the lowering of infant 
morbidity and mortality, but in raising the percentage of 
breast-fed babies to a very unusually high figure. The 
French people interested in the experiment were extremely 
gratified by the outcome, and it has attracted a good deal 
of outside attention. The work is to be continued another 
year with funds furnished by the Eed Cross and the De- 
partment of the Seine. The Patronage was recently or- 
ganized in such a way as to put it more definitely under 
the civil administration, a very complete system of pre- 
natal work having been installed and provision made for 
taking in other similar organizations with the idea that 
it would eventually become a complete center for the ar- 
rondissement of all kinds of child-welfare effort. 

The nineteenth arrondissement is one of the very poor 
quarters of Paris, where housing and living conditions 
are bad and mortality from all causes has been high. It 
was selected by the Eockefeller Commission as the section 
of Paris in which to make a demonstration of methods 
of anti-tuberculosis work, and as this and child-welfare 
activity are very closely related, the Red Cross started 
here, in cooperation with the Commission, an organization 
intended to comprise as nearly as possible all the im- 
portant branches of child-welfare effort. 

The beginning was made with three dispensaries, in each 
case under the same roof with the anti-tuberculosis dispen- 
saries, in which were conducted consultations des nouris- 
sons and clinics for older children. Development from 
this point was, however, greatly hindered for a time by 
calls upon the personnel for war work. Our army had 
struck its first blow at Chateau-Thierry, and now while 
the second great battle of the Marne was raging, found 
itself short of necessary nursing and medical personnel 



PARIS DISPENSARIES 121 

to care for its increasing number of wounded. The Chil- 
dren's Bureau drew heavily upon its forces to meet the 
military need, making up for the loss as best it could with 
Erench aides and curtailing its hospital work, but keep- 
ing up its organization in skeletonized form. Eorty per 
cent of the Bureau's nurses at Toul, for example, where 
the Red Cross was maintaining a home and hospital serv- 
ice for the children of that devastated district, answered 
the call of our army. It was the same everywhere and 
the Red Cross was able to furnish invaluable assistance 
to the United States Medical Corps in this emergency. 

Late in the fall of 1918, conditions for a resumption of 
the relief work for the children of France became more 
favorable. In Paris, in the nineteenth arrondissement, 
a very complete system of operation was worked out. 
When the dispensary group, with its system of home-visit- 
ing, general social service and training of visiteuses was 
well under way, a form of school nursing that proved 
very satisfactory was established in the two chief groups 
of schools. A home visiting service was introduced for 
purposes of demonstration in the neighboring dispensary 
of the Assistance Puhlique and later the nurses of the 
Bureau helped to train volunteer French visiteuses for this 
institution. The next step planned was a visiting home- 
keeping service and a series of food clinics and classes in 
dietetics. As the dispensaries were already over-crowded 
this required a new center, and the house finally obtained 
was by a very natural evolution soon converted into a 
genuine social settlement in which six of the personnel 
of the Bureau took up their residence. Kindergarten and 
playground activities were added, clubs formed for men, 
women, and boys ; classes in English, which were much ap- 
preciated, were established and the house in the rue Clavel 
became, and is to-day, a well-rounded and active social 
center of the type so familiar in America, with great ap- 
parent possibilities for the future. 

A French committee has recently been formed to carry 



122 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

on this whole system, with the mayor of the arrondissement 
as its honorary president. The connection with the ad- 
ministration is not at present as close as in the fourteenth, 
hut it seems likely that in time a very similar arrangement 
will be worked out. An American settlement worker will 
remain to direct the settlement house for at least a year, 
funds for her maintenance, as well as some other financial 
assistance for the Trench committee, having been provided 
by a group of citizens of Detroit. A recent addition to its 
activities has been the establishment by the American 
Y. W. C. A. of one of its '' Foyers des Allies " in the build- 
ing. The future career of an institution so characteristi- 
cally Anglo-American as this type of settlement in Prench 
surroundings will be very interesting to observe. 

A feature of special interest in the work of the Bureau 
in Paris has been the development of the system of pre- 
natal work, consisting on the one hand of pre-natal con- 
sultations in the districts, with complete medical and social 
records and a very good house-visiting service, and on the 
other hand of a system of visit eiises attached to the im- 
portant maternity hospitals, to establish a connection be- 
tween them and the homes, and after the children are 
bom to see that their mothers have the advantage of the 
consultations des nourissons. Systematic arrangements of 
this kind are needed almost everywhere in the United 
States as well as in France. This is one of the numerous 
cases where the personnel of the Bureau, having ample 
assistance and being untrammeled by outside duties, have 
been able to work out abroad things which they would have 
liked to do at home, where the opportunity was lacking. 
Eor this reason, as well as because of the really valuable 
information obtained from the French, the experience of 
the Red Cross workers in France leaves them better fitted 
for public service in America. 

The most important foundation in which the Bureau has 
had a hand in Paris, now occupying the Hospital Edith 



PARIS DISPENSARIES 123 

Cavell, but ultimately to have a building of its own, is 
that for a school of pediadrics in connection with the 
Faculty of Medicine. This is to be directed by a commit- 
tee of the Faculty and is intended to provide every facility 
for the training of students and graduates in medicine, 
nurses, visiteuses and social workers in everything per- 
taining to the care and well-being of the child. An endow- 
ment fund of two million francs has been provided, half 
by the Eed Cross and half by popular subscription. An 
annual government subvention of fifty thousand francs has 
been voted by the Department for this purpose, and the 
money for the building is furnished by a sum of approxi- 
mately two hundred and fifty thousand francs raised by 
the children of the United States as a gift to the children 
of France. 



CHAPTER XII 

WORK IN OTHER CITrElS 

1^ the Department of the Seine Inferieure a good deal 
was done by the Bureau for Belgian refugee children in 
connection with the American Red Cross Commission for 
Belgium. The centers of this were at Rouen and Le 
Havre, and in the course of their operations these two 
organizations developed a service for the care of children 
of the immediate districts which in Rouen especially be- 
came a very complete child-welfare system with a hospital, 
dispensaries in the city and outlying towns, a complete 
social service, a beginning of playground activities, school 
nursing, etc. Every possible use was made of local in- 
stitutions. The personnel was mainly Erench and pains 
were taken to adapt the work to the French situation and 
methods, and to maintain harmonious relations with the 
local faculty of medicine and the various philanthropic 
agencies. The Prefet saw the possibilities of the organiza- 
tion and arranged ultimately to take it over under the 
auspices of the prefecture in such a way that it seems 
to be the very satisfactory nucleus for a departmental 
system of child-welfare work, capable of indefinite exten- 
sion along the same lines. Combining as it does practi- 
cally all of the essentials of welfare work for children, 
and being really unique in its relation to the administra- 
tion of the Department, this establishment may well be 
a source of pride to the Red Cross. 

During the war the population of the city of Marseilles 
increased by almost half a million and, as in other cities 
of France, it was impossible to build houses to keep pace 
with the sudden growth. A part of this new population 

124 



WORK IN OTHER CITIES 125 

was military in character, but there were thousands of 
refugees also, a large percentage of whom were children. 
The problem of the orphaned or abandoned child was 
present in its most distressing form and the death rate had 
risen to forty-nine per cent. 

Early in 1918 the Red Cross sent a unit to help the 
French societies to relieve conditions among the children of 
this city. The program was much the same as those 
adopted in cases that have already been described. Dis- 
pensaries and a nursing service were established and a 
number of charitable institutions engaged in child-welfare 
work were helped. From Marseilles the Red Cross work 
extended to such neighboring towns as Avignon and St. 
Maximum, for nearly every city in Southern France had 
its refugees. 

Avignon, with fifty thousand inhabitants, possessed 
neither hospital nor dispensary and physicians were very 
scarce. There was in fact only one to every twenty thou- 
sand inhabitants throughout France in 1917, against one to 
every five hundred in America. 'Not far from Marseilles 
were two towns of twenty-five thousand inhabitants where 
there were but two doctors, both over seventy-five years old. 
The Red Cross started a dispensary in one of them, the 
town of Corbeil, furnishing a doctor and four nurses' aids 
who by means of several bicycles managed to attend to the 
medical needs of the civil population of the towns and a 
good many American soldiers besides. 

In Marseilles the Red Cross brought together the repre- 
sentatives of nearly fifty French institutions for the pur- 
pose of uniting on one comprehensive program of child- 
welfare work and the result was the formation of the Office 
Central, which eventually took over all the activities when 
the Red Cross terminated its work in the city. 

The worst conditions were not always in the big cities. 
Sometimes a small town received more than its share of 
refugees from the I^orth, or through lack of proper ac- 
commodations too many were housed under one roof and as 



126 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

most of them were old, or delicate women and young 
children whose health, owing to the hardships and priva- 
tions they had endured was not of the best, sickness soon 
broke out among them. The various bureaus and depart- 
ments of the Red Cross had their ostensible fields to which 
they were supposed to confine their efforts, but eventually 
there was much dovetailing and in emergencies, red tape, 
if any existed, was ignored and the necessary relief given 
by whatever Eed Cross unit found itself upon the spot. 
The Children's Bureau did much work among the refugees, 
old and young. Some of the conditions they met in the 
small towns of the South of France rivaled those of the 
slums of the crowded cities. 

In a town of two thousand inhabitants about two hun- 
dred and eighty refugees, most of them children, had been 
placed and a unit from the Bureau was dispatched to try 
to better their condition as it was reported that there 
was typhoid among them. Typhoid in one of these 
southern towns is no light matter and this village, sitting 
in a bowl among the mountains, offered favorable op- 
portunities for the birth of an epidemic. It had no sewer 
system and its water supply was derived from a common 
well from which it was pumped to a fountain in the center 
of the town where every one came with their pails and 
pitchers. All the clothes of the inhabitants were washed 
at a public lavoir. The garbage and refuse from the 
houses was placed in the street and collected once a week, 
and as flies were plentiful and the weather warm, condi- 
tions could hardly have been called hygienically perfect. 

The refugees had been housed in two old hotels and an 
ancient convent to which each century had added its quota 
of dirt. Having no other means of disposing of it they 
had thrown their garbage on to the roof of an annex. 
Dysentery and pneumonia had carried off two of 
them on the night before the arrival of the Bed Cross, 
and one child was found dying of tubercular meningitis 
and three were ill with pneumonia. There were twenty- 




5 s 



Si 

^ «J e8 



WORK IN OTHER CITIES 127 

seven cases of typhoid and dysentery and fifteen cases of 
skin diseases. 

The Eed Cross took one of the hotels in hand and gave 
it such a scrubbing and cleaning as it had never had be- 
fore in the course of its long existence, and into this reno- 
vated building they moved the sick, not without some op- 
position on the part of the mothers, who looked upon a 
hospital as the final step toward the cemetery; an obses- 
sion not infrequently encountered among the country 
people of France. 

The food furnished the refugees was coarse and ill- 
adapted to the needs of the patients, but with the con- 
densed milk and rice and other vegetables it was able 
to secure, the Red Cross managed to make up a reasonably 
good bill-of-fare. It also furnished the necessary medi- 
cines. Bad conditions had been going on so long, however, 
that the fight was very much of an uphill one at first, 
and, for a time, each day brought its fresh cases of typhoid, 
dysentery, pneumonia, grippe and bronchitis. The old 
convent where those who were not actually sick were 
housed, was cleaned and whitewashed and the refuse and 
garbage burned. Both groups, the sick and the well, were 
carefully tended and by the end of six weeks the various 
diseases were finally driven out of the little colony, which 
had been restored to a fair state of health. 

At about the same time that work for the children of the 
Meurthe-et-Moselle was started an appeal for aid came 
from the town of Kesle, situated in the center of that area 
from which the Germans were driven in March, 1917. 
It is a region of leveled villages, dead orchards, and fields 
gashed and torn by trenches and shells. The British had 
won it back from the enemy, but it was still in the War 
Zone and Nesle itself was under constant danger from air- 
raids when the Bed Cross unit arrived there. In the 
neighboring towns and hamlets were some twelve hundred 
children, all of them dirty and badly fed and many of 
them ill. The Red Cross immediately opened a clinic and 



128 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

in October establislied a small hospital. The condition 
and health of the children rapidly began to improve, but 
there were certain adverse factors in the situation that 
could not be eliminated. It was bitterly cold and the heat- 
ing provisions were inadequate. ISTight after night that 
winter the enemy aeroplanes came and the nurses had to 
seek refuge in the damp cellar, often with desperately sick 
children in their arms. 

On the 15th of February, 1918, the Eifth British Army 
took up its headquarters in the town and that night the Ger- 
man planes killed thirty British soldiers and wounded 
many. The next month the Germans began their great 
drive, advancing with unexpected speed, the British army 
falling back before them. Word was sent the Red Cross 
that it must evacuate at once. So rapid were the move- 
ments of the enemy's forces that the Red Cross personnel 
took only a handbag apiece and what supplies they could 
hastily collect, leaving behind all their belongings which 
they could not wear or carry in their hands. Arrange- 
ments were made for the evacuation of the children. In 
the camion with the personnel went Daniel, an eight weeks' 
old baby; a girl of fourteen with tuberculosis; several 
patients suffering from bums and several little convales- 
cents. They rode out of the town with the roar of the 
battle ringing in their ears. 

Two nights were spent at Roye and then the order was 
given to get out. I^esle had become a heap of ruins behind 
them and its homeless people were gathering at Roye to- 
gether with refugees from Ham and other villages along 
the line of the German advance. When the Red Cross 
camion started on its way to Montdidier it found the roads 
congested with moving throngs; travelers on foot, carts 
piled high with household belongings, droves of cattle, 
slowly and quietly journeying away from the homes which 
there was small chance of their ever seeing again. The 
patience of the French people under such crushing blows 
was due not to any lack of vitality, but to a kind of Spartan 



WORK IN OTHER CITIES 129 

firmness that refused to waver in the face of reverses how- 
ever severe. 

Little Daniel seemed to possess to the full the indomit- 
able spirit of his race. Usually hungry, always tired and 
sleepy and uncomfortably jostled, jolted and stained with 
the thick dust of travel, he rode on with his Ked Cross 
friends till at last they reached Amiens, to one of whose 
hospitals his sick mother had been sent. He must have 
thought it a most hospitable city for he received there his 
first meal of that day, after a fast of eight hours. 
Throughout the whole trip from E'esle to Amiens he had 
never whimpered. 

When this same great German drive was on the E-ed 
Cross sent a unit to Beauvais into which the refugees, 
many of whom were leaving their homes for the second 
time, were pouring in great numbers. Sick children lay 
on the floor of the railway station and others were con- 
stantly arriving. The majority of the babies had not had 
a mouthful of hot food for two days, or much that was 
cold either. The Eed Cross carried hot milk and bread 
to the trainloads of wretched people who otherwise would 
have had nothing to eat. The sick were tended and re- 
moved as soon as possible to a private home which the 
Eed Cross took over as a hospital, ^o one paid any at- 
tention to hours of work, but went on to the point and 
often beyond the point, where physical exhaustion made a 
rest imperative. 

This incident of Beauvais has no special significance but 
is cited as an example of the emergency work, pure and 
simple, that the Children's Bureau performed so repeat- 
edly and of which often only the briefest if any record was 
kept, except in the more notable cases. 

The large personnel of Eed Cross child-welfare workers 
stationed at Lyon carried on two definite activities. The 
first conceiTied the care of the children of repatries and 
refugees and involved the establishment of dispensaries 
working in concert with local charitable societies, a hos- 



130 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

pital for infants and children, a contagious hospital, a con- 
valescent home, and a country place for summer outings. 
The second activity which was in the nature of an educa- 
tional campaign included a very successful Baby Show, 
the training of a corps of French women as visiting nurses, 
the coordination of the local charitable efforts, and the 
granting of subsidies to various worthy institutions. 

The work was extended to some of the small towns in the 
neighborhood of Lyon. At Vienne, for example, which 
had a working population of twenty thousand, a rest-house 
for pregnant women was established, with a pouponniere 
where delicate babies were cared for, and a Eed Cross 
doctor made weekly trips to Koanne where the municipal 
authorities had fitted up a dispensary. When the organi- 
zation on December 29 announced the withdrawal of its 
personnel from Lyon, it presented the city with one hun- 
dred thousand francs and a plan for carrying on the work. 

The convalescent home for the children was the beautiful 
Chateau des Halles, lent by the owner for this purpose. It 
was situated about thirty miles from Lyon in an immense 
park and with its wide outlook, its quiet, and its beds and 
banks of flowers it proved an ideal place for the list- 
less young invalids. Their state before they were sent 
into the country was, as one nurse said, appalling. It 
was a matter of building up their systems, but youth is 
wonderfully elastic and with fresh air, nourishing food, 
and what medical attention was necessary in an amazingly 
short time the little patients became healthy boys and girls 
with a newly developed fondness for the out-of-doors life 
and vigorous sports of all kinds. Their day began at 
six A. M. with drills and exercises before a breakfast of 
chocolate, followed at seven-thirty a. m. by bread and 
butter. The hours for study, play-work and regular exer- 
cise were carefully planned. The children were kept at 
the chateau until they had fully recovered, when they were 
evacuated to the Secours des Bepatries at Lyon, whence 
they were eventually returned to their parents if they had 



WORK IN OTHER CITIES 131 

any — a great many were orphans — or to relatives or 
friends. 

The French Child-welfare Societies at Lyon, or most of 
them, had become temporarily impoverished during the 
war and as they only needed funds in order to continue 
the excellent work they had been doing, the Red Cross 
assisted them with certain sums of money. Regular 
monthly subventions were given to six of them. In this 
manner the Red Cross helped hundreds of run-down chil- 
dren to have summer vacations and gave aid in the form 
of nursing bonuses to a great many mothers who otherwise 
would have been forced to place their babies with wet 
nurses while they themselves sought work in the factories. 

A contagious hospital and a bureau for the examina- 
tion of the children of repatries were established at Dieppe 
and medical and nursing aid given the Society of Friends, 
chiefly to assist in the work at their two centers, Chalons- 
sur-Marne and Sermaize and at Le Glandier where the 
Society maintained a colony of some seven hundred refugee 
children from Belgium. At one time there were &Ye Red 
Cross nurses and an equal number of aids on duty at this 
colony and at various times the Red Cross supplied it with 
doctors, nose and throat specialists and dentists. 

The Le Glandier colony was an interesting experiment 
and one that attained a large measure of success. The 
initial aim of the Society was to build up the health of 
the children by daily play in the open air. They arrived 
in poor condition, sluggish and apathetic and so listless 
that they preferred to huddle around the stoves in the 
damp refedoire rather than make the least effort. With 
great patience and sympathy the Society gradually roused 
a willingness to play by starting the children on interest- 
ing games such as soccer and baseball, modified to suit 
sabots, the muddy court, and the large number of players. 
Singing games and rope-skipping were taught to the girls. 

When the school had at last caught the necessary spirit 
a more important part of the work was begun — boy 



132 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

scouting — which offered a good means of developing the 
boys morally and mentally as well as physically. Four- 
teen of the bigger ones, leaders in the school, were chosen 
as a nucleus and scouting was inaugurated on Sundays and 
continued at odd hours during the week. 

Brought up in an industrial town these boys were quite 
out of their element at first. They had to begin by learn- 
ing to enjoy the out-of-door life by playing simple games 
or following trails through the woods. As their interest 
grew they were taught some of the points of scout law, 
such as elementary hygiene, knot-tying, etc. Their number 
was soon doubled and finally raised to sixty. There was 
no longer any doubt about the success of the plan. The 
enthusiasm spread to the girls who, welcoming the Society's 
suggestion to take up a similar form of play-work, pres- 
ently formed themselves into a band of Camp Eire Girls 
under experienced women instructors. 

All the children learned to play with a zealousness and 
spontaneity such as probably had never before animated 
them in their games. Eegular exercise and daily baths 
inculcated in them an entirely new appreciation of bodily 
cleanliness and the spirit of fair play was born among 
them. The initial air of hostility toward the teachers and 
the tendency to bully their playmates that was noticeable 
among the so-called " bad '' boys gradually disappeared and 
little by little there came about a complete change of char- 
acter, mean traits and uncleanly habits being replaced by 
a boyish manliness and orderly ways of living. As for 
their physical condition, a Red Cross dentist said of them 
in 1918, that he ^' had never seen a healthier-looking 
bunch." 

At the time of their arrival at Le dandier under the 
escort of two Red Cross nurses and a Belgian physician 
these children had been in an exceptionally poor condi- 
tion, victims of '^ nerves,'' with frozen feet, fevers and 
colds, mouths dirty and diseased, and heads filled with lice. 
For two months the Red Cross nurses cared for them 



WORK IN OTHER CITIES 133 

ceaselessly, working almost twenty-four hours a day, but 
the splendid results were worth the pains. 

Among the French women employed by the United 
States camouflage factory at Dijon were many who had 
small children. Times were hard and though these little 
ones were so young that they needed a mother's care they 
also required food and clothing which could not be ob- 
tained save by the wages the women could earn. To assist 
these mothers the Red Cross took over a small barrack 
in the factory grounds and turned it into an attractive 
creche with cribs and other essential fittings. The en- 
deavor had a double effect. The babies were made com- 
fortable and happy and a number of women who had 
hitherto felt obliged to stay at home, realizing that the 
children would now have skilled care, applied for work. 
As the factory had been having great difficulty in turning 
out sufficient material to supply the demands of the Army 
the influence of the creche on production was distinctly 
helpful. Thus it might be said that these babies contrib- 
uted their mite toward the winning of the war. 

The school at Danmarie-les-Lys for refugee children 
from Alsace-Lorraine which was supported by the French 
government, was given Red Cross assistance in the form of 
medical aid and pharmacy equipment. At Bobigny the 
Red Cross furnished medical supervision of a French dis- 
pensary run by the commune and also gave some money 
and supplies. The people of this town were very poor and 
ignorant, living for the most part in small huts of crude 
construction, some of which had neither windows nor floors, 
being little better than cowsheds. While the place was 
usually a sea of mud there were few wells and cisterns 
and the majority of the inhabitants depended upon the 
canal for their water supply. What with these living con- 
ditions and the fact that, owing to war conditions, proper 
food was scarce it was not remarkable that the need of a 
dispensary was great. 

The Red Cross delegates had been warned that the 



134 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

people of Bobigny were difficult to deal with and would 
not brook anything that savored of interference in their 
habits. In consequence no house-to-house canvass was 
made, but only a few carefully selected visits and every ef- 
fort bent gradually to gain the confidence of the citizens. 
The effort was successful and many of those who were in 
trouble were soon coming to the delegates for advice ; but 
perhaps the chief triumph of Eed Cross diplomacy in this 
conservative little town was in winning permission to make 
a general medical inspection of the three hundred and fifty 
pupils of the girls' school. 

The yearly birth rate in Bordeaux in 1913 was ten 
thousand and the mortality one thousand; in 1916 the 
birth rate had dropped to five thousand while the mortality 
continued the same. The figures indicated plainly the 
need of child-welfare work. Something of the kind was 
being carried on by the local authorities but they were 
hampered by lack of funds and personnel. The Bed Cross 
decided to help the city cope with the situation and in 
1918 it gave money for the maintenance of a children's 
ward in the hospital, Maison de Sante Protestante, and 
for its service of district nurses. It, also, after some 
negotiations, settled upon terms of cooperation with the 
Creche de la Bastide; the whole title then became Dis- 
pensaire Franco-Americaine, This dispensary was sit- 
uated in a poor quarter on the opposite side of the river 
from that occupied by the main part of the city. Though 
it had a population of seventeen thousand there had been 
practically no doctors in the neighborhood since the be- 
ginning of the war and the death rate had been excep- 
tionally high. 

Other assistance was given by the Bed Cross, generally 
in the form of money grants such as those for establishing 
nursing scholarships and the one intended to serve as a 
nucleus for the foundation of a committee for the better- 
ment of the milk supply of Bordeaux, there being plenty 
of room for improving conditions in this direction. On 



WORK IN OTHER CITIES 135 

January 1, 1919, the Red Cross in pursuance of its gen- 
eral policy, began to withdraw its units from civil relief 
work in the south and center of France including Bor- 
deaux, but it agreed to continue the Creche de la Bastide 
and an institution called the Maison de Behe for some time 
longer, under French physicians, supplying each institu- 
tion with one nurse for one year from the newly formed 
nursing association. 

In the spring after the German drive upon Compiegne 
was broken Red Cross work was begun in the vicinity 
by the installation of several dispensaries, the first clinic 
being established at Yerberie in the reoccupied district. 
This little town, together with Senlis, Coudon, and Com- 
piegne, was ultimately given an excellent dispensary serv- 
ice which included education in hygiene as well as 
medical aid. It was all reconquered territory, more or less 
shattered by war, and naturally without doctors or any 
arrangements for the care of the sick, and the work of the 
Red Cross physicians and nurses was of great value in 
keeping up the courage and physical well-being of the 
people who were bravely beginning to return to their 
homes. 

At Valence two dispensaries for refugees were main- 
tained by the Red Cross which furnished the full equip- 
ment for both on the condition that after its withdrawal 
the work should be carried on by the Croix Rouge. When 
the Red Cross severed its connections with these activities 
in March, 1919, the French society automatically assumed 
all responsibility for their future guidance and continued 
the work with the aid of nurses trained by the American 
organization. At Dinard where another Red Cross dis- 
pensary was established for refugee children from IvTancy 
and the vicinity the situation was complicated by two 
severe epidemics of mumps and measles, but the little col- 
ony of nine hundred was brought safely through its 
troubles. Its school life was continued as regularly as 
under normal conditions. One of the songs the scholars 



136 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

learned to sing was a French translation of The Stdr Span- 
gled Banner: 

" Drapeau d'Independance, 

Emblem d'Esperance 
Au foyer de la Liberte, 
Flotte, flotte, etoile." 

Whenever a visitor appeared the voices of the youngest 
class would spontaneously ring out with these words, quite 
confident that its accomplishment was both striking and 
delicately flattering. The First Communion of one of the 
classes was made during its stay at Dinard and an affecting 
sight it was to see the sixty boys and sixty girls, in exile 
and far from their parents, march solemnly to the church 
to take upon themselves the religious duties of life. The 
Eed Cross had clothed them all, the boys in corduroy suits 
and the girls in gray dresses with white collars, and as a 
fitting observance of the important day it had also pro- 
vided a special breakfast and luncheon. 

The Children's Bureau of the Ked Cross was chiefly 
responsible for the foundation of an interesting attempt 
at a solution of the problem of the war-orphan. The essen- 
tial idea was that of a system of " placing out " of the 
young children in suitable homes grouped about a center 
from which proper medical supervision should be pro- 
vided, made more effective by the help of visiteuses dliy- 
giene, and by the provision of playground activities, 
kindergarten or other forms of schooling where needed. 
As the children grew older, the plan involved the giving of 
vocational training through proper connection with good 
farm schools, some of the various kinds of vocational 
schools for girls, etc., and the establishment of special 
centers for the children during this process of vocational 
education. 

A model " placing-out " system was established at Dun- 
sur-Auron, the funds for the foundation having been sup- 
plied by the Ked Cross. A Franco-American society 



WORK IN OTHER CITIES 137 

known as the Argonne Association has been formed to 
continue the work. Such centers could be multiplied 
according to the need and the resources at hand. Plans 
for the system of vocational education are well under way. 
The Ministry of Agriculture is much interested in the 
scheme for agricultural training, and as farm schools are 
a well-established thing in France and agricultural labor 
is much in demand, this part should be easy to develop. 
There are many possibilities in the way of vocational train- 
ing for girls also. The provision of centers for this exten- 
sion of the placing out idea may become part of the 
activity of the Junior Red Cross. The whole plan seems 
to be a very feasible way of helping to solve the problem 
of the war orphans. 

In all the work of the Children's Bureau the effort was 
made to combine and coordinate separate child-welfare 
activities and so far as possible to get them into close re- 
lation with public activities and municipal or departmental 
administration. France, like America, has harbored num- 
bers of small private welfare organizations which may 
have their place in breaking ground for future government 
activity, or in filling in, temporarily, certain gaps; but 
any one familiar with any kind of public health work must 
realize that it can never be carried out successfully on a 
broad scale except under governmental auspices. It has 
been a particular aim of the Bureau to further such 
development in France. The French are rather inclined 
to distrust their own government, but the experience of 
Americans in the country has been that it is perfectly pos- 
sible to work well with some of the municipal and depart- 
mental administrations, and each step in this line is an 
encouragement to further progress. 

The Children's Bureau is leaving behind it a number 
of activities successfully operating under French manage- 
ment, all of which may be expected to prove of very con- 
siderable value in their particular localities. They have 
all been intended to represent as nearly as possible the 



138 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

best and most recent developments in tlie particular kind 
of child-welfare activity involved, adapted to present 
French conditions. Child-welfare work has for some 
time been rather at a stand-still in France and in so far 
as these new activities are successful their chief service 
should be in stimulating and encouraging the growth of 
new work elsewhere. Evidence accumulates constantly 
that some of them are already having their effect and it 
seems reasonable to hope that as France emerges from the 
depression of the war and attacks her peace problems witb 
renewed energy, the work of the Bureau will bring a har- 
vest more than commensurate with the money and effort 
expended. 



CHAPTEE, XIII 

PROPAGANDA 

ASECOISTD form of constructive work carried on by 
th3 Children's Bureau was that of educational prop- 
aganda, designed to arouse the interest of the people at 
large in the problems of child hygiene, and to stimulate 
and assist in the development of new work along these 
lines in places where good organization was- lacking. 

A very extensive educational campaign did not exactly 
lie within the province of the Ked Cross whose first and 
foremost duty was to give as much emergency relief as 
possible to the children suffering from conditions brought 
about by the war. In so far as it could the organization 
combined the giving of relief with an educational service, 
using its dispensaries and hospitals as disseminating points 
for its attractive cards and pamphlets on child health and 
hygiene, and distributing a great quantity of similar mate^ 
rial among the French societies whose constant requests 
for it gave ample evidence that it was appreciated. Such 
requests were not limited to France. Algiers, Salonica, 
Corfu, Serbia, and England asked for and received this 
Eed Cross literature. 

The attention of the French people, though as readily 
caught, perhaps, as that of Americans, is not so easily 
influenced by such impersonal publicity methods and the 
Red Cross saw the necessity of following up this literary 
campaign by practical demonstrations of the lessons it 
preached. 

The Children's Bureau was functioning in France be- 
fore the overseas' forces of the United States had reached 
large figures so that for a time its activities were more in 

139 



140 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the nature of a diplomatic mission than a social service 
work. This was particularly true of the work in connec- 
tion with the traveling expositions, which was the means 
chosen for calling the attention of the people more directly 
than could he done by posters and pamphlets, to the im- 
portant facts of infant morbidity and mortality and the 
tuberculosis situation, together with the methods of value 
in meeting these problems. 

These expositions were of two kinds: large exhibits, 
held in such cities as Lyon, St. fitienne, Toulouse, and 
Marseilles, and small portable ones, operated jointly with 
the Kockefeller Commission, which traveled through ten 
of the busy central Departments, showing at most of the 
principal towns. They were visited by great numbers of 
people and aroused much favorable comment, and it is to 
be expected that they will bear fruit in the future devel- 
opment of good work in the localities where they were 
held. Outside of the interest they aroused in child-wel- 
fare work they were of value in that the}^ brought home 
to the people the true spirit of the United States and the 
significance of their co-operation in the war. 

As a matter of fact many of the people were at that time 
skeptical as to the aims of America. German propaganda 
had been insiduously spread among the working classes and 
in many quarters had succeeded in arousing the belief that 
we meant to ^^ Aonericanize " France ; that the huge docks 
and warehouses and other constructions over which our 
engineers were laboring were intended less for the use 
of our army than as an entering wedge for our capitalists, 
who were seizing upon the entry of the United States into 
the war as a pretext for obtaining control of French in- 
dustry. 

This feeling was noticeable in such places as St. iStienne. 
The town with its surrounding cluster of smaller villages 
is a large industrial center and after the occupation of the 
North by the Germans it had become the most important 
mining community in France. It is an unattractive town 



PROPAGANDA 141 

of belching chimneys and wooden factories most of which 
were engaged in manufacturing munitions. The seat of 
radical socialism and frequently the scene of troubles be- 
tween capital and labor, it naturally was fertile soil for the 
German-made rumor that American dollars meant to in- 
vade France and capture her industrial opportunities. 

Because of its factories refugees from the IsTorth were 
from time to time sent to St. ]6tienne, and the American 
Red Cross had delegates there to aid in receiving and car- 
ing for them till occupation could be found for them. 
The delegates had not come into contact with the radical 
socialistic element which up to the time of the arrival of 
the Children's Exposition were more or less fixedly of the 
opinion that the United States were seeking their own 
selfish ends. 

It was not with the intention of combating this feeling 
that the Eed Cross decided to hold a " Baby Show," as it 
was called by the personnel, in St. fitienne. The ''Ex- 
position des Enfants " had already been successfully given 
in Marseilles and Lyon, and St. Etienne, crowded with 
artisans and refugees, suggested itself as a point where 
a demonstration of child-welfare work would prove of 
value. Certain Erench people thought the contrary. 
They believed that these artisans would not prove recep- 
tive. " They are apathetic and distrustful," was their 
comment. " We have tried and have had no success.'' 
]N"evertheless the Red Cross sent its unit which installed 
the paraphernalia of its " show " in the building where 
the labor unions and syndicates have their offices, the 
Bourse du Travail, popularly known as the '' hoite des 
greves/' or nest of strikes. 

To get in touch with the people the Red Cross represen- 
tatives approached the Secretaire Generale of the Bourse 
and the Secretaire Generale du Syndicat des Metallur- 
gistes who finally consented to take them before a meeting 
of the united Syndicats Departinentales de la Loire, where 
they could present their cause. On the day agreed upon 



142 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the delegates were usliered into the council room, where 
around a huge table sat a number of workmen, the labor 
leaders of the Loire. One of the Eed Gross delegates has 
vividly described the scene and the impression it made 
upon her. She had expected to find apathy and ignorance ; 
she met a group of men marked by toil, roughly dressed 
and rough of manner almost to fierceness, but alert, keen- 
eyed, masterful. Her French friends had been right in 
one particular. These men were distrustful and resented 
the intrusion of the Red Cross into their affairs. 

For a few minutes it seemed that the errand of the 
representatives was out of place in the determined gath- 
ering, which was apparently concerned only in plans for 
ending the war and establishing the brotherhood of all 
labor; but gradually its hostility changed to interest as it 
listened to the address of the delegate. She told them 
frankly how as an American accustomed to freedom of 
action and speech, she was hurt and surprised by their 
intolerance toward an organization which had come to 
them in all sincerity to ask assistance in an effort to 
ameliorate social conditions. Was it the spirit of the broth- 
erhood of man, in which they so deeply believed, to stifle 
a genuine expression of the good-will of the American peo- 
ple ? The Eed Cross had come to them with a true desire 
to cooperate in the generous spirit of comradeship, as the 
representatives of one people should with representatives 
of another. Here was no charity but solidarity, no self- 
seeking but a disinterested desire to help a comrade in 
distress. Eeal fraternity had rarely been so strikingly 
expressed as in this work of war relief undertaken by the 
American Eed Cross in France. 

The interview was long and the arguments were not all 
on one side, but it ended satisfactorily. The gathering 
became as enthusiastic as it had been suspicious and every 
hard hand was extended in welcome to the delegate and to 
America when^it understood at last the idealism and the 
unselfish strength of purpose back of all the Eed Cross 



PROPAGANDA 143 

effort. The representatives of the united Syndicats ac- 
cepted the Exposition des Enfants as their own and issued 
proclamations advising all their members to visit it and 
give it support in every way. At the opening session the 
Mayor and Prefect, the clergy and the leaders of the 
Socialistic party, appeared on the same platform. To 
the citizens of St. Etienne this was almost as astonishing 
as the outbreak of the world war. 

As an epilogue that was most gratifying the Red Cross 
unit received a personal request from the director of one of 
the largest factories in France employing about thirty 
thousand workers, begging it to bring the exposition to his 
town because in his opinion it had reached the working 
people as the organization which he represented had never 
been able to do and had thus succeeded in giving them a 
better understanding of America and her part in the war. 
He expressed his conviction that the coming of the Red 
Cross would tend greatly to improve the morale of the 
workers and be for the good of the whole town. 

The Exposition des Enfants at St. fitienne was the 
third show on a large scale to be held by the Red Cross. 
The first had been opened at the progressive city of Lyon 
in April, 1918, where it had run for three weeks. The sec- 
ond took place soon after at Marseilles, the great cosmopoli- 
tan seaport of the Mediterranean. In no city of France 
are the conditions less favorable for children or the need 
for popular education in hygiene greater. In both these 
cities, but particularly in the latter, the Red Cross dele- 
gates found a complicated web of sectarian, political, and 
even racial interests contending with each other in almost 
every walk of life; but as in other activities of the Red 
Cross it came about that its members, working solely and 
unselfishly in the interests of general humanity, could 
bring these various elements together as no other agency 
might hope to. 

Small exhibits were given in other towns as at Bourges, 



14:4 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

and in the fall of the year a fourth large show took place 
at Toulouse. By this time the character of American in- 
tervention had heen shown at Chateau-Thierry and St. 
Mihiel. Many American soldiers had passed through 
the city, and in the hospitals — Toulouse was a French 
hospital center — some of our men were lying as patients. 
The community did not have to he educated as to the 
good faith of America. For the first time in the history 
of the Exposition des Enfants it was possible for the 
personnel to confine all their efforts to the accomplishment 
of the primary purpose of the show, a demonstration of 
child-welfare work. 

The modus operandi of the large expositions was prac- 
tically the same, hence a description of that at Toulouse 
will suffice to cover all. Through the courtesy of the 
Mayor the Eed Cross unit was given the use of the Holies 
des Graines, where the grain raised in the region is sold 
and samples of it exhibited, as at the Chicago Wheat 
Pit. Through the services of fiYQ Friends, lent to the Ex- 
position by the Friends' Bureau, partitions were erected, 
flooring laid and platforms built and the bare structure 
transformed into a series of booths arranged around a 
central space that was used as a cinema hall. Visitors 
to the show had to pass through an improvised turnstile 
that was a triumph of Quaker ingenuity. With a little 
lumber, some burlap and a cyclometer a machine was 
fashioned that measured each person as he entered, and by 
a simple mathematical process kilometers were converted 
into people and thus the attendance for the day was as- 
certained. 

Conveniently near the turnstile was the information 
desk where appointments were made for examination by 
the medical staff and information of a general nature given 
out. In the first booth was the dentist's chair, surrounded 
by posters graphically illustrating the proper care of the 
teeth and the results of neglect. The main object of in- 
terest was the work performed on the children by the Red 



PROPAGANDA 145 

Cross dentist who cleaned the children's teeth and gave 
the mothers detailed instructions as to any dental work 
that might be necessary. AVhen extraction was an imme- 
diate necessity it w^as done, but otherwise the dentist, as 
w^ell as the other doctors connected with the Exposition, 
confined herself to diagnosis and instruction in preventive 
measures. Instead of there being any question of compe- 
tition with the local medical profession the Red Cross 
doctors probably provided them with a large increase of 
practice by impressing upon parents the importance of 
having children medically treated. 

The second booth was in charge of nose and throat spe- 
cialists and in the third the children were examined for 
defects of posture and corrective exercises were prescribed. 
In another were given instructions in dietetics with illus- 
trations of fireless cooking and the construction of simple 
iceless refrigerators. This was one of the busiest points 
of the show, for the anxious French mothers, not content 
with eagerly listening to the lectures, asked innumerable 
questions. Another exhibit that made a strong impression 
upon the people was that of the Rockefeller Tuberculosis 
Bureau, the ominous and regular flashes of whose red 
electric sign recorded with each flash the death from the 
" white plague " of a stated number of Frenchmen. 

A model play-ground composed one popular exhibit and 
there was a very attractive kindergarten that interested 
many school teachers. In a mothers' rest-room celluloid 
dolls were used in demonstrating the proper way of wash- 
ing a baby and putting it to bed. The dolls, by the way, 
were bathed so vigorously that it was necessary for the 
handy Quakers to re joint them at the conclusion of the ex- 
position. In the last booth, from nine to six, the children 
were given a complete physical examination after they had 
been undressed very much against their will. If anything 
was wrong with the little ones the examiner explained the 
trouble to their mothers and advised them as to the kind 
of specialist they ought to consult. 



146 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

finally in the cinema hall, the various points were 
summed up and emphasized by well-planned films that 
gave in an interesting way all sorts of lessons on health 
and hygiene. 

The object of these expositions was not only to help the 
individuals who came into personal contact with the Eed 
Cross workers, but also to stimulate the desire of the 
general public for organized effort for the welfare of chil- 
dren. An intelligent interest in such work has of course 
always existed in France, but continued action in social 
service is much more difficult to obtain in that country 
than in America whose citizens have the habit of public 
expression and cooperation. Social, political and religious 
interests in America are not such bars to team-work as they 
are among the French. The process of " getting together " 
is infinitely slower and more cumbersome in the latter 
country. It was hoped that a knowledge of how the United 
States had staged their child-welfare campaigns and what 
had been accomplished as a result of them would be -of 
some encouragement to social workers in France. 

There is little doubt that among the thousands who 
visited the Eed Cross expositions many of the laboring 
classes received a new conception of the importance of 
giving young children a fair chance to acquire health. 
Incidentallj^ they found themselves relinquishing some of 
their old vague ideas of America and forming others which 
were frequently expressed in the following fashion: 

" We always knew America was a nation of wonderfully 
organized business, but we believed that all Americans 
were absorbed in the purely practical. We did not realize 
that they were so idealistic and that the idealistic and 
practical sides of their nature were so well-balanced that 
during the stress of war they could think of the France 
of to-morrow." 



CHAPTER XIY 

WAR ORPHANS 

THE Guthrie Society, an American organization for 
the relief of French war orphans, had begun to 
function in 1916 at No. 28 rue de la Tremoille, Paris, 
and by the fall of the following year was assisting over 
eighteen thousand orphans. In view of the President's 
declaration concerning the absolute necessity of a con- 
centration of administrative action in American relief 
work this society, in October, 1917, turned over its work, 
its funds, and its little pensioners to the greater organiza- 
tion, the American Eed Cross. 

At first the care of the eighteen thousand orphans to 
which the Red Cross had then fallen heir was placed in 
the hands of the Children's Bureau, which later on made 
a division of all the work relating to children, retaining 
control of all that was medical and passing on everything 
of a non-medical nature to a new bureau, the Bureau of 
War Orphans. 

The '' Aide aux (Euvres " was the point of contact be- 
tween all the French Children's Societies, not doing 
strictly medical work, and the Red Cross. Most of these 
societies had stations in Brittany and Southwestern 
France, some occupying chateaux which their owners 
had lent for orphanages, but wherever possible the 
child and its mother were kept together. Many citizens 
had taken little orphans into their homes, but as the war 
continued it became increasingly difficult to place children 
in this way. The situation was critical at the time the 
Red Cross arrived in France. It was necessary to act 
quickly, and generously, and possibly some of the Red 

147 



148 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

Cross aid was given unscientifically, but tlie impression 
this immediate and lavish assistance made upon the French 
was of the greatest value. Certainly without such help 
the suffering among the destitute children would have been 
much greater. 

For several years the school authorities of Paris had 
provided poor children with a luncheon for which a small 
fee was asked. Naturally the burdens of war occasioned 
an increase of poverty and the number of children who 
could not afford to pay for the luncheons grew steadily 
larger, to such a degree that a noticeable diminution of 
health was observed by the Eed Cross physicians. Here 
was a promising field for the spread of tuberculosis, always 
prevalent in city slums and alarmingly so in those of 
Paris during the war. The Children's Bureau took hold 
of the situation and by making generous free donations of 
food for a year brought the health status of the children up 
to a marked extent. A medical examination at the be- 
ginning of the following term showed that such good results 
had been accomplished that it was not necessary to reopen 
the Eed Cross school canteens. Similar canteens were 
established for short periods in one or two other cities. 

One of the most interesting of the Bureau's activities was 
that which had to do with the '^ Stars and Stripes War 
Orphans." The war orphans' " adoption " plan sprang 
from a genuine bit of sentiment. From the very first 
there existed a pretty friendship between the American 
troops and the French children. At that period the youth 
of France were prepared to see a romantic hero in every 
doughboy and the glamor was not lessened when they found 
him what he really was, not much more than a boy, frank, 
full of fun, and always ready for anything in the way of 
a game. The children were the first to greet him at the 
dock when he landed and wherever he went they were 
always on hand to applaud him. A kind of freemasonry 
instantly arose between them and it was not long before 
boys who had run away from home or had become separated 



WAR ORPHANS 149 

from their parents in the devastated regions began to attach 
themselves to various American regiments in the rear 
areas, along the lines of communication, in the billeting 
areas behind the lines, and even in the front lines. The 
soldiers petted these little mascots and shared their food 
and blankets with them, and good-natured company tailors 
fitted them out with uniforms. 

After a time the more thoughtful of the soldiers realized 
that to give them this sort of life was not the best return 
for the affection of their small friends and the plan of 
sending them to school was originated. A company of 
United States Engineers was the first unit to decide on 
this, and to raise contributions among the men to pay for 
the elementary education of their mascot. 

In March, 1918, the Stars and Stripes, the official news- 
paper of the American forces in Erance, started a cam- 
paign for the so-called adoption of war-orphans by individ- 
ual soldiers and groups of soldiers. This plan was wel- 
comed so enthusiastically by the men that before long the 
originators found the work more than they could attend 
to and they asked the Red Cross to take care of the various 
and often complicated details of the adoption. 

Five hundred francs was the amount set for the yearly 
maintenance of each child. The money was paid in four 
quarterly installments to the Stars and Stripes who turned 
it over to the Red Cross. That organization had its list 
of war orphans and it selected from among them those 
who were most in need of such assistance, sending the 
names and photographs and any details that might be of 
interest to the soldiers who wished to adopt a child. The 
soldiers themselves made the final selection from these 
data. 

At the beginning more than one child from a family 
was permitted to have an American " god-papa " but the 
Red Cross finally realized that it was better to allow only 
one to be adopted. The first orphans were from those 
refugees who had been living in villages under bombard- 



150 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

ment and for these the small donations from the soldiers 
furnished a very much needed relief. In some cases it 
meant the difference between some bread and butter and 
none at all. Later on another class of orphans was in- 
cluded in the plan, the children of the cities that had not 
been under fire, but whose fathers had been killed in the 
war. The addition of the adoption fund to what she 
might herself be earning made it possible for the poor 
mother to hold her family together and carry on an ade- 
quate standard of living. In special cases payments were 
made to fit the circumstances. If a widow needed capital 
with which to stock a small shop or to purchase implements 
for her garden or farm, the entire five hundred francs 
would sometimes be paid over in one lump sum. 

During the first week of the Stars and Stripes cam- 
paign five children were adopted. Funds then began to 
pour in and by the fall the newspaper was encouraged to 
start a " Christmas drive." This was so successful that 
by the end of December money sufficient for nearly three 
thousand five hundred orphans had been received, not to 
mention a miscellaneous fund of several thousand francs, 
representing small amounts to be used in behalf of the 
children for any purpose that might be considered advis- 
able. Money continued to come in after the drive was 
over and to handle it a Continuation Fund was created, 
to serve as a reserve for renewing the support of chil- 
dren after the first year by the original adopter or 
adopters. 

Special donations of varying amounts were sent to this 
fund from time to time, frequently from returned soldiers, 
who found on reaching one of the demobilization camps 
in the United States that they still had a few francs in 
their pockets. 

Some months ago the Paris edition of the Chicago Trih- 
une gave all of its profits made during the war to General 
Pershing to be used as he saw fit to decide. The Com- 
mander-in-Chief presented the one hundred and fourteen 



WAR ORPHANS 151 

thousand francs to the Comrades-in-Service, an organiza- 
tion then being launched among the members of the 
A. E. F. On the disbanding of this society it turned 
over the considerable portion of the fund left to the 
Stars and Stripes War Orphan Fund and the amount, 
approximately eighty-five thousand francs, was added to 
the Continuation Fund. The Stars and Stripes itself 
sent a memorial to the Congress of the United States re- 
questing that the profits which arose from the publication 
of the paper in France should be placed at the disposal of 
the little French orphans. So far the sum of two million 
one hundred and eighty-four thousand, six hundred an 
forty francs has been received from the army and a few 
other sources, every centime of which goes to the children, 
the American Eed Cross meeting all the administration 
expenses. 

The plan was at first received with some lack of cor- 
diality by mothers and wives in America, who misunder- 
stood the situation, expecting that a flood of small children 
would accompany the troops home after the war, but as a 
matter of fact the French Government was quite opposed 
to the carrying away of children from the country. The 
arrangement was merely a temporary one. 

The children were extremely proud of being adopted 
by American soldiers and did their small best to show their 
affection and gratitude, sending them little gifts, such as 
socks knitted by their own hands, or chestnuts they had 
gathered, besides photographs and many letters. It was 
the aim of the Stars and Stripes to encourage the soldiers 
and their wards to write to each other. The photographs 
of the childre;^ and their translated letters were always 
posted on the company's bulletin board. The mothers also 
wrote frequently describing how the children, since their 
adoption, were always striving for excellent marks in their 
studies and in their general conduct trying to conform to 
the standards they knew their American godfathers would 
approve. 



152 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

The following are sample letters from two little war 
orphans : 

*'*' Dear Godfather: 

" When my father left for the war, he said to me : ' My 
son, I shall he gone for a long time perhaps. You must 
write to me often.' I did not forget to write to father. 
I was happy when his answers came, and so was mother, 
and my sisters and my brother too. One day there was 
no answer to my letter, — my father never answered me. 

" You have been good enough to take pity upon me, 
and to send mother the money father would have earned 
for me. 

" You are to me somewhat like my father, and I love 
you. That is why I wish to please you and to write to 
you as I would write to my father. 

" I preferred to read his letters and to write to him, 
rather than to go out to play. 

" I shall do just the same with you, because my heart 
tells me to. 

" I send you my best love. 

" Alexander Tutin.'' 

" Dear good Godfathers: 

" I want to tell you at once, how happy and proud I am 
to be your little ward. Mother already talked to me 
about you before this, when we received your kind letter 
and the generous gift enclosed. We were just having 
dinner with my sisters and — I do think mother cried 
for joy, when telling us the good news. On the morrow, 
I told all my school-fellows about it ; the teacher even read 
aloud the letter from the American Red Cross and every- 
body cheered and shouted, ^ Hurrah for America,' 
Here, I am very far away from the war, but father went 
there and never came back. Our teacher says, you have 
come to avenge him, so I tell you twice ; — thank you, 
once for father and once for me. 



WAR ORPHANS 153 

" I live with mother, my grandfather and my sisters in 
a little village in the Alps. Father wsiS sl smith in that 
village but now the shop is abandoned and it is very 
sad. If such is your wish, we shall have a chat together 
every month. Tell me when you will be fighting, and I 
shall pray for you. Tell me also, how many you are and 
will you write all your names in ^ American ? ' 

" Good-by, dear Godfathers, I love you from the bottom 
of my little French heart. 

" Louis Jeannot Alphand." 

It was evident that the interest of the soldiers in the 
plan was not wholly broken off by their return to the 
United States, for many renewed their subscriptions after 
their demobilization and others wrote asking about the 
welfare of the orphans which they or their units had 
adopted. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE WHITEI PLAGUE 

IVx " Thank you with all our hearts for the gen- 
erous inspiration you have had to send to us, poor patients 

of the Hospital a great number of your favors. Oh, 

how sensitive we are of the strong feeling you have to 
desire to better the situation of the most modest but saddest 
victims of the war by giving to us 'the greater part of your 
work and resources. 

" We, soldiers of France, Monsieur le Directeur, have 
not only courage and stability, we have also children's 
hearts open to all affection shown to us. We resemble 
the fruit of which the appearance does not always predict 
the flavor. We are not of these glorious wounded and our 
hospitalization has not the noble origin we would have 
wished — one which calls for help by visible scars. We 
are irreducible fighting men — on the battlefield — but 
conquered by sickness. We are the most to be pitied, and 
you come to us because of this motive. 

" Debris of the army, we shall not have the honor of 
doing our bit to the end of this common task and we shall 
not pass under the Arc de Triomphe after the Victory, 
but we call for this day with all our soul and we are proud 
to have sacrificed for this — our lives. 

" We address to you. Monsieur le Directeur, with our 
most sincere gratitude, our best wishes for you and your 
devoted associates, also the subscribers of this patriotic 
and meritorious work of the American Red Cross." 

In 1917 there were thousands of French soldiers dis- 

154 



THE WHITE PLAGUE 165 

abled by tuberculosis and almost all of them, like tbe writer 
of the above letter, were convinced that they had con- 
tracted the disease in the trenches. As a matter of fact 
the majority where tainted before the war and were there- 
fore not entitled to a pension, which added to the wretch- 
edness of their lot. The Government had made some pro- 
visions to alleviate the misery of these unfortunates and 
had drawn up a comprehensive plan that was expected 
to take care of every case by 1919. At the period when 
the American Ked Cross began to function in France a 
large number were still in need of hospital facilities and 
proper food. Moreover this was only one aspect of the 
situation and except from the point of view of military ex- 
pediency, perhaps the least important. 

Tuberculosis, always rife throughout France, had dur- 
ing the last twenty years cost the country nearly a million 
lives taken chiefly at the military age. In Paris and the 
other cities having a population of over twenty thousand 
inhabitants the death rate was more than twice that of 
'New York City from the same cause, and the difference 
is made more striking when one considers the taller build- 
ings and much less open character of New York. 

In spite of these conditions France had never made any 
serious nation-wide attempt to deal with tuberculosis be- 
fore the war. Neither the hospitals nor the physicians 
were compelled to report it to the sanitary authorities and 
practically the only special provision for its treatment had 
been made by private initiative. There had been almost 
no anti-tuberculosis propaganda. 

As is well known tuberculosis is difficult to diagnose, 
and it is so insiduous that many cases become infectious at 
a period unknown to themselves, but by a general and sys- 
tematic campaign England and America have greatly 
lessened the mortality from this disease, in some com- 
munities as much as sixty per cent in the last thirty 
years. Educating the masses in the simple methods of 
warding off the evil and treating it in its first stages has 



166 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

been one of the first and most important steps in the anti- 
tuberculosis campaign of the two countries. 

The French Government and the French people seemed 
in the main not only indifferent to this situation, but also 
to the lack of adequate health legislation, organization, and 
administration. Apparently something was needed to 
rouse them to an appreciation of the fact that the public 
health situation w^as far from what it should be. This 
the war succeeded in doing. 

The mobilization of the male population and the sub- 
sequent hardships of the trenches revealed in a way that 
could not be ignored the extent to which tuberculosis was 
fastening itself upon the nation. Health conditions among 
the displaced civil population were worse than in the army. 
There were several reasons for this. The refugees, the 
repatries, and the returning prisoners, all had undergone 
privations and were in the main in poor physical condition. 
Many of them were already tainted with the disease and 
these rapidly became hopelessly ill. Owing to the diffi- 
culty of securing adequate housing their temporary quar- 
ters were frequently overcrowded, sometimes several 
families occupying one room. Thus the disease found 
unusual opportunities to spread. 

What with her own displaced people and the great influx 
of foreign troops and war laborers of one kind or another 
the population of the uninvaded portions of France had 
increased by about eight millions. Her cities and villages 
were congested, food was high and scarce, particularly 
that required by infants and invalids, and better wages had 
resulted in a larger consumption of alcohol which " makes 
the bed for tuberculosis." 

The expert sent to France by the Rockefeller Founda- 
tion in February, 1917, to investigate the tuberculosis sit- 
uation, said in his report : ^^ There is no health problem 
with which I am familiar or with which I have even come 
in contact which it seems to me offers a broader or more 
useful field of activity for the Eockef eller Foundation than 



THE WHITE PLAGUE 157 

this one; nor is there anywhere a more fruitful field of 
usefulness or one in which a greater contribution can be 
made to the benefit of the human race." 

In July, 1917 the Eockefeller Foundation sent a work- 
ing commission to France to apply there, so far as possible, 
the anti-tuberculosis methods which had proved so suc- 
cessful in the United States. The American Eed Cross 
created its Bureau of Tuberculosis in August of the same 
year and the two organizations cooperated in the fight 
against the disease. 

A tuberculosis program can be stated briefly as follows : 
An adequate dispensary system to search out the disease. 
A dispensary system operates at the hand of reasonably 
well-equipped diagnosticians, and examines the material 
brought to it by the diligent search of visiting nurses. 
Past experience has shown that in large communities par- 
ticularly, practically ninety per cent of the tuberculosis 
problem is located by the system while ten per cent is 
located by general practicing physicians. 

Given a perfect and complete dispensary system, there is 
presented such an immense problem that for economic rea- 
sons, only a fraction of this disease problem can be 
treated. 

There are two points to be considered in the treatment : 
1-The isolation of advanced and dangerous cases which 
are a very frequent source of infection to their children 
and families. 2-The proper treatment of cases that have 
the chance to ameliorate their condition or to recover. 

Given the discovery of the total disease problem, it is 
possible to treat or even to isolate but a small fraction of 
the total problem. Perfection in treatment and isolation 
is now considered as twenty per cent of the total disease 
problem. 

To illustrate concretely therefore in France, approxi- 
mately four hundred to eight hundred dispensaries are 
to-day necessary. Less than one hundred exist. One 
hundred and ^ye thousand treatment beds, to be divided 



158 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

between hospitalization and sanatoria, are needed. A 
little more than twelve thousand exist. 

The first step the Red Cross took was a quick inspection 
of all the tuberculosis hospitals that could be reached in 
the various Departments, a step which enabled it to un- 
derstand the numerous excellent projects that had been 
planned but had been suspended because of war conditions. 
As a result the first needs of the moment received attention 
such as, to single out a few for special mention, the activi- 
ties at Bligny, Tournay-Charente, Montbron, and Aspet. 
Later on a second and more deliberate visit was made 
that left the Eed Cross very well informed as to the 
general situation and the plans made by the French to 
ameliorate it. 

Red Cross assistance sometimes took the form of money 
contributions, at others furnishings, clothing, food, medi- 
cines and recreation. The last item included the installa- 
tion of recreation rooms which, owing to the type of insti- 
tution and the initial over-crowding, usually did not exist ; 
the repair and sometimes the complete equipment of these, 
and the provision of games, toys, and additions to the 
libraries. Frequently there were no facilities for taking 
outdoor cure in inclement weather so that it was impossi- 
ble for the patient to get away from his bed, and when 
such improvements could be speedily and economically 
made cure-galleries or porches were installed by the Red 
Cross. 

The Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in 
France, sent over by the Rockefeller Foundation, had de- 
cided to establish two demonstration centers, one in a large 
city where the problem of congestion and poverty would be 
plainly presented, the other in some rural district that 
'would be representative of average conditions in the 
French provinces. For the civic center the ninteenth 
Arrondissement of Paris was finally selected while the 
Department of Eure-et-Loir was chosen for the rural dem- 
onstration. The four chief cities of the Department of 



THE WHITE PLAGUE 159 

Eure-et-Loir, which has a normal population of two hun- 
dred and seventy-two thousand people, are Chartres, 
Dreux, Chateaudun, and Nogent. The Commission 
created a system of dispensaries with visiting nurses in 
each of the first three. Dispensary extensions were es- 
tablished in the smaller communal towns which were 
reached by automobile. The Ked Cross lent a physician 
to each of the dispensaries and supplied the entire relief 
of the dispensary organization created by the Commission 
in this Department, and in the nineteenth Arrondissement 
in the city of Paris as well. 

The excellent Hospital St. Joseph in Paris had pur- 
chased a property for seven hundred and fifty thousand 
francs and was about to fit the building up for the care 
of one hundred and fifty advanced cases of tuberculosis. 
The cost of the repairs, two hundred and fifty thousand 
francs, was the extent of their resources. The Eed Cross 
saw here an opportunity to perfect the contemplated plans 
and make a contribution to the permanent equipment 
against the disease in Paris and with this idea it offered 
the hospital the additional three hundred and twenty-five 
thousand francs needed to carry out the improvements it 
suggested. To Bligny Sanatorium at Bligny, Seine-et- 
Oise, the Ked Cross gave the sum of four hundred and 
thirty-six thousand francs. This sanatorium is the crea- 
tion of the CEuvre des Sanaioriums Populaires de Paris, 
a private society which has established one of the best pub- 
lic sanatoriums in Prance. 

At the outbreak of the war its two main buildings for 
two hundred and sixty patients were requisitioned for mili- 
tary purposes. There was under construction an addi- 
tional building with a capacity of three hundred. Among 
the dependencies of this building was a nurses' home and a 
nurses' training school built along excellent lines. The 
new building for patients was about half finished in the 
summer of 1914. Materials were on the ground and all 
facilities available for carrying forward one-half of the 



160 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

work toward completion. This was considered a wise 
activity for tlie Eed Cross to assist as it would place 
into function, with a little crowding, three hundred per- 
manent beds. The building when completed was occu- 
pied by French military tuberculous. At the close of 
the war it was returned to the authorities for the care of 
the civilian tuberculous of Paris. 

Two hundred thousand francs were appropriated to San- 
atorium Lege, destined to be the departmental sanatorium 
of the Gironde. A large amount of money had been col- 
lected and the buildings already begun, but it was found 
that the sum on hand was not sufficient and there was dan- 
ger of the project being abandoned when the Red Cross 
supplied the deficit. 

Two hundred thousand francs were appropriated to the 
8ociete de Secours aux Blesses Militaires, being added to 
the fund of one hundred and fifty thousand francs of this 
organization, for the purchase of a property for a depart- 
mental sanatorium in the Indre-et-Loire. It was provided 
in the gift that the function of this institution should be 
for the departmental needs and that it should become a unit 
of the departmental machinery for the control of tubercu- 
losis in the Indre-et-Loire. 

Cash contributions of lesser amounts were given to vari- 
ous activities but in no case did Red Cross contributions 
equal fifty per cent of the total cost of the project, in many 
instances the appropriations being as low as one or two 
per cent of the total cost of the work. In certain regions 
it was not feasible for the Red Cross to enter with its per- 
sonnel because of the military situation. To supplement 
existing tuberculosis work in these regions small cash do- 
nations were made. 

The Red Cross cooperated with the Commission for the 
Prevention of Tuberculosis in Prance in an educational 
anti-tuberculosis campaign, which concerned itself with the 
Prench civilian population, and in which the people were 
particularly interested as it was their first acquaintance 



THE WHITE PLAGUE 161 

witli anything of the kind. The method followed was to 
send out through the departments specially equipped auto- 
mobiles with lecturers, moving pictures, literature, news- 
paper articles, and posters. It required from two to three 
months for one of these camions to accomplish its work in 
a Department. 

On November 10, 1917, the country estate known as 
" Hachette," located at Plessis-Kobinson, ten kilometers 
south of Paris, was turned over to the Bureau of Tubercu- 
losis for the operation of a tuberculosis unit for civilian and 
refugee women and children of the Paris district. It was 
the largest imit undertaken by the Bureau and was named 
'' Trudeau " as a compliment to the pioneer of French 
origin in tuberculosis work in America. The installation 
was well adapted to the needs, but was temporary and was 
abandoned after the war. The property was returned to 
the Department of the Seine who proposes to use it for 
a Garden City, one of the nine such institutions that have 
been planned. Each will be approximately one hundred 
and sixty acres, and each will correspond to a sector of 
the city of Paris. It is the hope of the authorities to re- 
move from each sector of Paris a certain per cent of the 
population for installation in small houses of modem type 
in these nine " gardens " and by this means to establish 
modern villages and at the same time to disperse the popu- 
lation of Paris, particularly that part which is not able to 
disperse itself. 

The repatries coming back from the invaded region 
through Switzerland arrived at the rate of about one 
thousand a day at Eviani when convoys were coming 
through. The practice of returning citizens from the re- 
patriated regions having been mutually agreed upon by 
France and Germany, all such persons were systematically 
returned with the exception of the able-bodied of both 
sexes. The men were held as prisoners of war and the 
able-bodied women as workers. The convoys, therefore, 
consisted for the most part of women in poor health, or 



162 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

with large families of children, and of the aged of both 
sexes. The percentage of tnberculosi-s among them was 
occasionally quite high — often varying from thirty to 
sixty-five per thousand. Many repatries returning 
through Evian were in no mental state to carry out the 
impersonal demands of health or hygiene. It was usually 
impossible to separate a tuberculous mother from her 
family whatever that family might consist of. A certain 
number of cases arose where it was possible to take care 
of the whole family unit by placing the children in a 
children's hospital and the tuberculous mother in a hos- 
pital, pending the re-uniting of the family. 

It was for this purpose that one hundred and eighty 
beds for women were opened by the Bureau at St. Genis 
Laval near Lyon. The hospital was repaired, minor 
equipment added, staffed and the deficit of operation paid. 
The work was extended and dispensary assistance was 
given in Lyon by the administrative staff. 

The tuberculosis work of the Eed Cross in Blois con- 
sisted in the operation of a dispensary and small sanato- 
rium, but the effort was of more than usual interest as it 
was the first work undertaken in the provinces. It was 
based upon the previous four years' interest of an active 
American who directed attention to the opportunity. A 
dispensary was equipped, a physician and nurse were in- 
stalled, seven hundred and seventy-five patients received 
attention, and seventy-five families received assistance in 
the homes and the work has progressed to such a point that 
its legitimate expansion throughout the Department will 
be a matter of easy accomplishment provided the neces- 
sary funds are forthcoming. 

It is of interest to record here that of the total money ex- 
pended in this dispensary endeavor, four-fifths came from 
French sources and but one-fifth from the Eed Cross. The 
tuberculosis effort in Blois and the results obtained illus- 
trate to what extent the program may be realized by the 



THE WHITE PLAGUE 163 

activity of a few interested people properly supported in 
their endeavors. 

Before tuberculosis organization was effected in the 
United States Army, the Ked Cross offered it a one 
hundred bed hospital for the care of cases that could 
not be transported to America. The changing medical 
activities of the army called for four centers for the 
preliminary care of the tuberculous soldier preparatory 
to his discharge for America, but the offer of the Ked 
Cross was accepted and the hospital ultimately made to 
function. The Eed Cross further cooperated with the 
army in the preparation of plans for the sanatorium to be 
located at Base Hospital IsTo. 8 and in the matter of 
tuberculous education among the troops. 

Out of a population of about four millions and a half 
Serbia lost during the war one million and a half through 
emigration. Some twenty thousand Serbian refugees 
came to France and her near by colonies, a large number 
of whom were students and young collegiates. Their con- 
dition was bad and their resources extremely limited. 
The question of their relief was presented to the Red 
Cross in the fall of 1917, and thoroughly investigated 
during the ensuing winter. The needs of these exiles was 
found to be so urgent that the organization approved a 
total budget of one million francs to be devoted to their 
relief. As its share the Bureau of Tuberculosis contrib- 
uted four hundred beds for those suffering from tubercu- 
losis and established several canteens in the large centers 
to assist the four thousand young Serbs to obtain a daily 
ration that would not drop below the minimum normal. 
In addition a few delegates were placed in the field whose 
mission it was to give special attention to the smaller 
groups. 

To sum up the activities of the Bureau of Tuberculosis 
it attempted to do the following things : 

First: To bring regular relief in the way of food, 



164 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

clotliing, medical supplies, treatment facilities and recrea- 
tion to twenty-five thousand consumptives. It supplied 
the entire relief of the dispensary organization created by 
the Rockefeller Commission in the Department of Eure-et- 
Loire and in the nineteenth Arrondissement in the city of 
Paris. 

Second : To assist in the maintenance of beds that were 
destined for the treatment of tuberculosis either of hospital 
or sanatorium type. It functioned more than twenty-six 
hundred such beds. Similarly it assisted tuberculosis dis- 
pensaries in the same manner. The great principle upon 
which it operated, as the Bureau was concerned chiefly 
with hospitalization factors, was not only the establish- 
ment of new beds which were very much needed, but also 
the avoidance of the mixing of tuberculosis patients in the 
general medical wards of the general hospitals throughout 
France. 

The Bureau discovered an admitted twelve hundred 
mixed cases in the general hospitals of France. Reorgani- 
zation of these hospitals with the establishment of isolation 
pavilions would practically institute another twelve 
thousand beds at comparatively little cost. Intimate 
propaganda has been carried on in two important centers 
to bring this about and it is now in general in a fair way 
of acceptance. 

As minor activities, the Bureau assisted in the ameliora- 
tion of the existing treatment facilities in many tubercu- 
losis hospitals and created, by finance outright, two hun- 
dred permanent beds that have been wholly paid for. 



CHAPTER XVI 

GOIWG BACK 

OjSTCE upon a time America had its frontier families 
who, breaking away from the main settlements, scat- 
tered themselves like frnitfnl seeds over an unknown 
country. These groups were composed in a sense of picked 
individuals. They were not home lovers, but nomads, 
restless of spirit, full of courage and strength, preferring 
the hardships of a free, wild life to the quiet comforts of 
towns and villages. The idea that the new world held 
somewhere a fortune for them was firmly fixed in their 
minds, as was the resolution not to wait for it to turn up 
but to cut a short way to it. The country teemed with 
fish and game and the men were trained hunters or soon 
became such, so that it was seldom there was not meat 
for the pot. The wives were little inferior to their hus- 
bands in pluck and adaptability and the children were as 
healthy and vigorous and as much in tune with their strenu- 
ous life as young Indians. 

After a fashion the returning refugees resembled these 
early frontier families. They were — and are still for 
that matter — going into territory that is familiar, but 
whose old civilization has been almost wiped out and where 
in the majority of cases life has to be begun afresh under 
conditions little better than those encountered by the 
American pioneers. In some respects their situation is 
not so favorable. The open camp of the pioneer was more 
hygienic than the dugouts, cellars, and ruined dwellings in 
which the refugee shelters himself, and his whole mode of 
life was healthier, his food heartier, his prospects more 

alluring. But in making any such comparison one vital 

165 



166 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

difference is at once obvious. The refugees are physically 
as unfit as tlie pioneers were fit. The strong among them 
have been culled and the weak left to carry on the burdens 
of life. 

The spirit of the refugees is quite as dauntless as that 
which animated the pioneers. They are not ignorant of 
the conditions they have to face and they realize their lack 
of youth and strength, but that does not hold them back. 
When all the troops are demobilized the men folk will be 
hurrying into the devastated regions to do their share, 
but there are thousands of homes to which no men will 
return. In the meantime one can do something so long as 
one is not a helpless cripple. And the old people feel quite 
ready to cut a little short the span of life that still remains 
for them so long as they can die near their own homes and 
lie in the family cemeteries. 

Some of those who have means are as much attached to 
the soil as those who, before the German invasion came, 
had never been able and never wished to leave it. There 
are men and women to whom the loss of their chateaux is 
of small importance from a financial point of view, who 
have returned to live among the ruins in little wooden bar- 
racks during the heat of the summer. The owner of one 
of the finest modem chateaux in France is living to-day in 
a two-room bungalow in what was once a beautiful garden 
on a terraced slope. Four years ago there were few views 
more delightful than the one commanded from this slope, 
but now the countryside is one wide panorama of desolation 
as if it had been scourged by a kind of leprosy that had 
pitted and eaten the soil and reduced the woodlands to 
thin groups of dry gray skeletons. Of the village below, 
once such a warm, significant feature of the landscape, 
one can distinguish merely a pale rough patch like a half- 
healed wound. The village will never rise from its ashes 
for its whole surroundings are so hopelessly war-torn as 
to be unfit for human occupation, and the Government 
has decided to transfer its name to a new site. 



GOING BACK 167 

The chateau is a huge heap of stones, scattered about and 
mixed with the churned-up earth. The fruit trees are cut 
down, the gardens gashed with trenches and shell-craters 
of great depth. Near one of them lies a huge unexploded 
shell bearing the French stamp, one of the iron flock that 
brought ruin to this splendid property. The Germans 
were in possession and the artillery officer who knocked 
the chateau about their ears and razed every tree or 
trench is the man living in the little hut on the edge of 
the garden. With his own guns he destroyed his home so 
thoroughly that not even a rabbit could find refuge there, 
and the feeling uppermost in his mind seems to be one of 
pride in the efficiency with which he did his work. 

There are many others like him, titled members of the 
aristocracy, who have come back to live with and help the 
returning people. Their cooperation has aided the Ameri- 
can Red Cross to a wise and just distribution of its relief 
stores, and their share of the partnership has been the 
active work behind counters, receiving the long queues of 
refugees, taking their names and their wants, investigating 
their circumstances, handing out supplies, keeping the ac- 
counts, visiting the sick, giving advice and assistance every- 
where. The presence of these people has had an excellent 
influence upon the villagers who, in spite of their sup- 
posedly republican standards, look up with considerable 
veneration to the grand seigneur. 

The cure is another power among the French. His 
rule is mild but nevertheless effective, and he is more than 
a priest ; he is a practical man with a wise eye for the 
material interests as well as the souls of his parishioners. 
In him the people know they have a champion of their 
rights, a man whose education and standing enable him 
to have access to the authorities; who will see that they 
are not overlooked or put aside. 

Like the physician, the cure has been to the war and 
was in the thick of it. The old ones who could not go 
have returned to their villages, in most cases ahead of their 



168 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

flocks. The Ked Cross has found some of these aged men 
working all alone among the ruins of their churches, sal- 
vaging }3its of material out of which to make a temporary 
house of worship, and living on next to nothing in the 
meanwhile. But if the cure comes some of his people are 
sure to follow quickly. He is a point around which to 
rally. So also is the mayor, who has more than the mere 
political importance so often the main asset of similar 
dignitaries in America. Home life and village life mean 
everything to the Frenchman who seldom interests himself 
in matters outside of these circles, and given the cure and 
the mayor, voila ! there one has the essential and pregnant 
nucleus of village life. 

One must have seen the devastated regions of France in 
order to form a just conception of the ruin war left in 
its wake. Some smooth and smiling areas still remain, 
but the centers of life, the towns and hamlets, the farms 
and factories and mines no longer exist. War systemati- 
cally concentrated upon these points all its destructive 
powers and blotted them out. So furious and thorough 
was the work that even the land they occupied is in many 
cases wrecked beyond repair, its once productive soil 
slashed with thousands of miles of trenches, pitted with 
millions of over-lapping craters, buried beneath upheaved 
tons of unfertile chalk and clay and gravel. Orchards 
were deliberately hewn down, or cut to pieces by storms of 
missiles. Where there were valuable forests only stumps 
and bleached skeletons of trees stand to-day. Canals and 
railroads were wrecked; bridges blasted into heaps of 
twisted steel and broken stones; telephone and telegraph 
lines swept away as if tbey were cobwebs ; sewers, water- 
systems, wells, ruined beyond repair. Cattle, horses, 
sheep, poultry, every living creature of any economic 
value was killed or carried off. This extensive region, 
formerly so populous and prosperous, was reduced to a 
condition little superior to that antecedent to its occu- 
pation by man. 



GOING BACK 169 

The Government has begun to put workmen into the 
devastated regions and to-day directs a force of three hun- 
dred thousand peaceful moppers-up who are removing from 
the land the tangled webs of barbed wire and the danger- 
ous litter of unexploded shells and hand-grenades, and fill- 
ing up the miles of trenches and the countless shell-holes. 
Two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres of this land, 
however, are beyond restoration, at least without the ex- 
penditure of more money than they could be made to re- 
turn. One big section lies around the towns of Albert, 
Lens, and La Bassee. Another, running through the 
Chemin-des-Dames region, stretches along just east of the 
Hindenburg Line, while a third is situated southeast of 
Nancy. The Government plans to buy these areas of no- 
man's land from the original owners for purposes of for- 
estation, and some of the battle-scarred areas will bear 
woods of American birth, for many thousand little pine 
seedlings have been sent to France as gifts from our 
country. 

After the signing of the armistice on November 11, the 
Eed Cross shifted the field of its refugee relief activities. 
It withdrew its personnel from the center and south of 
France, leaving supplies in its warehouses sufficient for 
the French societies to carry on during the months of 
January and February, and concentrated all its efforts 
along the line in the devastated regions where, as the dis- 
placed population were then returning in large numbers, 
the need of assistance was naturally the greatest. All the 
civilian work done in these regions, instead of being more 
or less independently performed by the zone delegates as 
heretofore, was consolidated and administered completely 
by the Department of General Eelief in Paris. Warehouse 
headquarters were established at various central points 
from which the Red Cross stocks of food, clothing, bed- 
ding, tools, etc., were given out to the French officials and 
societies for distribution among the people. 

Of the Red Cross plans for its final work the Director of 



170 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

the Department of Civil Affairs made the following state- 
ment: 

" The armistice and approaching end of the war is de- 
mobilizing French resources and the work of the American 
Red Cross is becoming less essential to France. Men are 
returning from the army to start normal lives which will 
enable them to again support their families. (The French 
soldier has a daily wage of about five cents a day, in 
addition to the allocation of thirty cents a day paid to his 
wife and twenty cents a day paid to his children under 
fifteen.) French physicians will be demobilized and en- 
abled to care for civilians ; labor is freed to cultivate the 
land, to man the factories which produce necessities, to 
help resolve the tangle of transportation into which mili- 
tary needs have tied the railroads at times. 

" The American Red Cross is endeavoring to see the 
most needy classes of French civilians — the refugees — 
through the winter months, and to carry to the devastated 
regions goods which will aid in the reestablishment of nor- 
mal living in what is now a desert. With that done, it will 
feel that its civilian workers can leave France with the 
assurance that they have done their share on the second 
line defense — a line where battles often have been only 
slightly less bitter and less agonizing than on that first line 
where all attention has been concentrated for four years 
and a half." 

As a result of the policy outlined above, the Department 
of General Relief on January 1, 1919-, included: 

The Bureau of the Liberated Zone. 

The Bureau of Emergency Relief. 

The Bureau of War Orphans (Stars and Stripes Fund), 
while under the Medical and Surgical Department the 
activities of the Children's Bureau were continued until 
April 1st J and those of the Bureau of Tuberculosis until 
May 1st. 

It was planned to close the seven warehouses of the Lib- 
erated Zone by July 1, but it was expected that the distribu- 




o ^ 



GOING BACK 171 

tion of the Red Cross stock of supplies in the devastated 
area extending from the IvTorth Sea to Switzerland would 
go on for at least two months more, the responsibility for 
such distribution being placed upon the Erench relief com- 
mittees. 

After the armistice the tide of refugees set all one way. 
Those who for obvious reasons could not do so before this 
time began to move homeward. In many cases there was 
absolutely nothing for them to return to save the scarred 
land itself. There was no shelter for them nor any means 
of earning a living, but in spite of the protest of the 
authorities they insisted on going back. The farmers had 
the best prospects. There were always bits of ground on 
which crops could be raised, if seeds and a few agricultural 
implements could be had. The Germans had taken care 
not to leave anything of the kind behind. What they 
had not taken away they had destroyed. Farming on an 
extensive scale was of course impossible, but the American 
Eed Cross and other relief societies made provisions to 
supply the man or woman who wished to cultivate small 
plots with seeds and simple tools. 

The first thought of these people was to get to work 
on the land. Anything in the shape of a dwelling house 
was a secondary consideration. They contented them- 
selves with the most crude and often unhealthy habitations, 
which were neither vdnd nor rainproof and devoid of 
furnishings of any kind. Living without mattresses, on 
beds of boards or heaps of stale straw, was not good for 
these old people, particularly as they had too much work to 
do and too little to eat. It was work indeed for younger, 
more vigorous arms, but the strong men of the country 
were either in the army or lying in their war graveyards. 

Some of the refugees had been able to take a cow, a 
horse, or a few goats with them when they left their vil- 
lages. These as a rule had not gone far from the War 
Zone, but had camped as close to it as was possible, lead- 
ing a kind of gypsy existence until the retreat of the Ger- 



172 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

mans had enabled them to return. With some livestock 
life was not so hard, but the great majority had none. 
The fact that cows were particularly scarce made it diffi- 
cult to provide proper food for the little children. The 
Prefects of the various Departments warned the refugees 
of this and many left their children in the care of the Red 
Cross or some of the numerous French orphanage societies. 
Others persisted in taking them with them and these would 
have fared badly if the relief associations had not taken 
special pains to see that they were supplied with milk or 
other suitable nourishment. 

Often the land was so thickly strewn with grenades and 
unexploded missiles of all kinds that it had to be cleared 
with the greatest care before agricultural operations could 
be begun. In some of the worst districts the Government 
undertook to do this, but the people would not always 
wait for slow-moving officialdom. When the children did 
return with their mothers or relatives they were a source 
of anxiety for they could not be left without a guard as 
there was danger everywhere. 

One of the first and most important needs of the refugees 
was for schools. Some of the children had not been to 
school for five years. The Frenchman believes in educa- 
tion and he wants his children to make up for the time they 
have lost. Moreover while in school the children would 
be under the teacher's eye and the parents could work 
on their plots of ground without anxiety. Here and there 
teachers are returning and the Government is trying to 
meet such cases by the construction of simple buildings, 
but progress along this line will be necessarily slow for 
some time to come. 

Cows that had been worth five hundred francs before the 
war cost five times that amount after the armistice. Some 
heifers were imported from Switzerland, but few indi- 
viduals could afford to buy them, and clubs were formed, 
one cow being bought by several families and used in 
common, and they were glad to get them even on such 



GOING BACK 173 

terms. An experiment with Brittany cattle was not much 
of a success for these little cows when turned into the 
rich pastures of their new homes promptly put on so much 
fat that they gave almost no milk. It will be a long 
time before the dairy industries of the devastated regions 
can be reestablished. 

The smaller animals are easier to obtain and the Red 
Cross has supplied flocks of sheep, hens and ducks, and 
quantities of rabbits, which are one of the mainstays of the 
-French peasant family. Yet though they have many 
pressing needs the agriculturists are in general better off 
than the factory hands and those who gained their living 
by some form of work other than that connected with 
farming operations. These refugees have absolutely noth- 
ing to go back to, yet thousands of them have returned and 
there were other thousands that never left their towns, 
but were held by the Germans up to the last moment, like 
the spinners of Lille. 

When they saw victory slipping out of their grasp the 
Germans were resolved not merely to cripple but to kill the 
industries of this busy section of France. Their most 
furious efforts at destruction were perhaps directed against 
the metallurgic industries. The forges, foundries, and 
factories of Denain, Anzin, and other cities were first 
looted of every machine, tool, or product, finished or un- 
finished, and then razed to the ground. The ha>ssins 
of Briey and Longwy, taken by the Germans in 1914,^ 
were so wrecked that three years will be required to put 
them in pre-war condition. 

It will be from three to five years before the coal mines 
of Lens can be made to produce again. Every one knows 
how they were flooded. The Germans ordered the miners 
to cease work, leaving three hundred horses underground 
where, in spite of the appeals of their masters, they were 
left to die of thirst and hunger. This cruel deed accom- 
plished, the tubing was blown up and the water allowed to 
flow into the excavations until they were completely filled. 



174 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

And the mined mines of Lens represent only one-fifth of 
the total destruction in the coal fields. 

In Cambrai, Armentieres, Halluni, and Kouhaix the 
cambric and linen manufactories were wrecked beyond re- 
pair, the finest machines carried away into Germany, the 
rest broken up into scrap-iron and the buildings blown 
up. The curtain factories of Saint-Quentin met the same 
fate. "Not only the factories, but the towns in which they 
stood were reduced to heaps of stones and ashes. All of 
the numerous large sugar factories around Amiens and 
Arras, with their complicated iron-work and bloated tanks, 
sprawl over the ground like huge burnt, dismembered 
spiders. The Germans took a good deal of pains to smash 
these structures thoroughly, for they make beet sugar 
themselves. 

In its way the situation at Eheims seems quite as hope- 
less as at Lens as the city is much bigger. Though many 
of the houses are standing, they are only roofless, empty 
shells, their walls too cracked and loosened to serve as units 
in any scheme of repairs. Most of them must come down 
to be rebuilt from the foundations. The mere preparatory 
work of cleaning up the acres of heavy rubbish will re- 
quire an enormous outlay of money and time. The water 
systems of none of these towns exist; the reservoirs are 
blown up and the mains cut and crushed in hundreds of 
places. The wells of hundreds of hamlets have been filled 
up, or poisoned with decaying animal matter and other 
substances, so that the refugees who have returned are not 
infrequently three or four miles away from the nearest 
water that can safely be used. Every drop they drink has 
to be carried that distance, usually by hand. 

The physical character of such industrial centers as 
Lille, where the Germans settled early in the war and held 
possession for a long time, did not suffer such blighting 
changes as did those towns over which the waves of war 
passed and repassed. Here and there houses were de- 
molished and many received severe injuries, but to the 



GOING BACK 175 

casual view the streets and the buildings look about the 
same as usual. It was the interiors of the houses and 
factories that suffered, especially the latter. The Ger- 
mans carried out their looting system — one can call it 
nothing less than a system — most efficiently at Lille, the 
industrial importance of which has long been a thorn in 
their sides. 

Their spinning-machine experts followed the troops and 
inspected every workshop and factory from roof to base- 
ment. On all the machines that were modem or of special 
value to the German trade a warning that they were not 
to be damaged was placed. When military conditions be- 
came such that transportation was less congested these 
marked machines were shipped to the Fatherland and set 
up in German factories where they are running to-day. 
This large scale looting was performed in a leisurely 
fashion and pains were taken not to injure the machines 
in transit. Those not considered worth taking were broken 
up for their brass or copper parts and the rubber on their 
rollers. All the leather belting of the factories was stolen, 
all the brass piping and even the brass door-knobs of private 
houses. The sledge hammers and cold-chisels of the Ger- 
mans were busy for many weeks in the work of destruction. 
When it was done they could say with truth that Lille, as 
an industrial rival, was crippled for many years to come. 

One thing Lille still has and that is her dwellings, 
but without the business upon which her inhabitants de- 
pended for their living, her advantage in this respect is 
slight. Can she keep her citizens until the factories are ret- 
fitted and supplied with new stores of raw materials and 
coal ? To replace the stolen and scrapped machines and 
tools will require an expenditure three or four times larger 
than the pre-war price of such material and, what is of 
almost greater moment, it will take a long time, for the 
articles that Lille needs for the reestablishment of her 
trade are not in stock. 

These are some of the problems that face the people 



176 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

of the devastated regions. The industrial worker may or 
may not have a roof over his head, but in the majority of 
cases he has no occupation. The agriculturist may have a 
bit of land he can cultivate, but his home is a heap of 
stones. 

War indemnities may in part remedy such situations as 
that at Lille if official machinery will move with prompti- 
tude, and the French Government is doing all that it can 
to oil the wheels. Its inspectors are already estimating 
the amount of damages to which the various factories and 
workshop owners are entitled. 

In addition to clearing up the land to permit the re- 
sumption of agriculture the government workmen are mak- 
ing temporary emergency repairs upon houses and so far 
eighty thousand dwellings have been made at least habit- 
able. Seventy-five thousand barracks have been ordered, 
but it is very doubtful whether they can be delivered be- 
fore winter and the people must have proper shelter dur- 
ing the many months of that wet, cold season. The Gov- 
ernment is trying to meet the situation by building 
numbers of temporary huts from materials that are on 
the spot; old wood, felled trees, doors, etc., roofing them 
with sheets of corrugated iron, thousands of which were 
left behind by the troops, and plastering the flimsy walls 
with mud mixed with straw. But when one considers that 
two hundred and forty thousand buildings were completely 
and one hundred and seventy thousand partially destroyed, 
and two millions of people made homeless, the immensity 
of the task can be realized. If this great number of refu- 
gees could return to a few large centers the work of hous- 
ing them would be difficult enough, but they are going 
back to more than three thousand towns and villages scat- 
tered far and wide across the North and East of France. 

The ^Government realizes that shelters for the people 
must be provided quickly and that these shelters must give 
them adequate protection against the coming winter. If 
this is not done a grave situation must be faced, for there 



GOING BACK 177 

will be an exodus of discouraged inhabitants wbo will never 
return again to these regions. 

When in January, 1919, the Red Cross began to wind 
up its affairs in France, the Department of the Liberated 
Regions, answering a request for suggestions as to what 
America could do to be of further service in the devastated 
zone, replied that the continued giving of goods or their 
sale at less than market rates was no longer expedient 
as it discouraged the local dealers from returning and 
opening up their shops. So far as it was ne'cessary to 
furnish emergency relief, this could be done by the French 
societies. The great and immediate problem concerned 
the children, and in this matter our cooperation would be 
of the highest value. 

Take for example the case of Lille where there are to- 
day sixteen thousand children between six and thirteen 
years of age. During the four years of German occupa- 
tion the development of these little ones was practically 
arrested. Mentally and physically they are four years 
behind what they would have been if they had lived under 
normal conditions, and from seventy to seventy-five per 
cent are tubercular. Xo better proof of the sort of treat- 
ment the Germans gave their helpless and innocent cap- 
tives could be asked than this. They are not only in a 
wretched state themselves, but are an actual menace to the 
community. In other towns there are other children who 
show quite as pitifully the withering influence of German 
war rule. To get these children away for a long visit to 
the seashore or the mountains under happy conditions 
would mean many lives saved and many feeble little bodies 
made sound. It is a big task, for their numbers run up 
into the thousands and their parents — in many cases the 
fathers are dead — have no money to spare. Some indeed 
have lost their all. 

France does not expect us to help her with this problem, 
but when the Red Cross asked its question she pointed to 
her children. France needs aid also in starting hospitals 



1Y8 AMERICAN RED CROSS IN FRANCE 

and dispensaries in the chief cities of the Departments and 
arrondissements, with traveling dispensaries that would 
reach the smaller towns and villages. She would like to 
see them established and run after the American fashion, 
whose value was demonstrated to her by the Red Cross, 
with a few American doctors and nurses in charge who 
would train French personnel in that social '' follow-up " 
work so well known in our country, but which France does 
not have. Lastly, she desires to copy our social welfare 
work and create in her leading towns institutions re- 
sembling our community centers where the people can meet 
to sing, write or play games, or witness moving-picture 
shows. In starting this, as well as the other forms of 
social work, she believes that American initiative and ex- 
perience would be essential. 



PEINTBD IN THE UNITBD STATES OF AMERICA 



